Couple of weeks ago, by chance I read some articles (from different sources) about global warming, overpopulation, worldwide resources, world's education and that entire thing you might have heard already about humans destroying the planet slowly. I know that you may be feeling a bit tired about this subject but I was actually thinking what if you have a real chance of making instant-huge changes on earth, what would you do?

So, in one afternoon during my coffee break, I wrote down an email with some specific key questions and I sent it to some friends around the world (thanks everybody for the well detailed answers), these answers gave me a good idea about what kind of resources-tools we could use for making quick-drastic changes on Earth so I built up a Flash interface with the idea. I have published the whole thing on facebook but it is also available here (both use same database)

http://www.yoambulante.com/en/labs/FixPlanetEarth/

The technical part

Well, it is all about Flash and using some resources only available on Flash player 10 like its drawing API; copyPixels, drawTriangles, blending modes, etc. It is a bit interesting, this app didn't take me long, I did the whole thing from scratch in just few days. It took me exactly 9 days working at nights, it definitely looks more complicated of what it actually is. I think it could be a good practice for the people who are interested to know how it was made. This is a very simple program, it is pure actionscript without using extra libraries or extra resources (I am not using any 3D Engine), it is just actionscript with some good magic bits of bitmap data manipulation (the performance of the app when rollover the countries on a 3d projections was a good challenge).

I am currently thinking in writing an article explaining it step by step divided by days. You might wonder where I got all the data from, textures, countries data, filters, etc, and the answer is simple; Wikipedia. Did you know that Wikipedia has an API which you can use from Flash and extract any kind of data you want?

I have extracted automatically all data I needed in my app from Wikipedia, including the countries coordinates, capital, globe coordinates in degrees (latitude and longitude), mouse rollover sectors, highlights; i.e. this piece of code extracts from Wikipedia the string where the capital name of a country localized:

Unfortunately, I ran out of time, this is all what I can say so far, I will write down an article explaining it bit by bit (I soon as I have the chance) it was a very interesting practice for me.

Cheers guys!

Tuesday featured talks by the likes of (among many others) André Michelle, Grant Skinner, GMUNK. A little after midnoon a frenchman in his late twenties walked up to the stand in the blue hall and introduced himself as Matthieu Bessudo, better known under his pseudonym McBess (mcbess.com). Many of the attendees present may have been somewhat surprised to learn that this very calm and seemingly peaceful guy actually creates the super-crowded and very vibrant artwork that McBess is known for (also including the creative for this year's Flash In The Can). In his session McBess showed some of his early and later works and shed light on his work-process, which on the spot turned into a very interesting live drawing session where he asked the audience for 5 things they liked, combining them into one drawing (beer-drinking, pudding-eating dinosaur with boobs on a bicycle anyone?).

Just after 5, Ben Radatz led the attendees through the work and work-process of MK12 -- including work on the opening credits for the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace.

On wednesday Mike Creighton kicked off the second day of the event in the red hall with his presentation entitled "Harnessing the Abundance", followed by names such as Carlos Ulloa (creator of Papervision3D) and Robert Reinhardt (author of the Flash and ActionScript bibles). Also very mentionable was Thijs Bernolet from Little Miss Robot hacking Shawn Pucknell (main FITC guy) his Facebook account -- during the presentation (more about that on the FITC blog).

FITC Amsterdam was closed off by Evan Roth in his session about open source, viral media, art that isn't boring and waiting for Jay-Z to call you on the phone. I hadn't seen Evan before but immediately found his presentation to be one not be missed out on. The talk ranged from huge digital/interactive graffiti on tall buildings, to hacking an airplane-seat so that the person in front of you won't put it back, to editing N.W.A.'s 'Straight Outta Compton' to only include the cuss-words.

All in all, although already a great event, Shawn and the rest of the FITC people managed to turn Flash In The Can Amsterdam 2011 into an even more varied and overall better happening -- hats off!

Photos courtesy of Tim, one of the people behind SpringFestival.

For example, if you had a text field that looked like:

Then the function call would look like:

drawGradientText(this, myTextField, 10, 10, "gradientStyle");

Your code would also need to include the GradientCanvas class, and define a CSS class like this:

.gradientStyle    {fill-alphas: 1,1; fill-colors: #ff0000, #0000ff; corner-radius: 0}

The complete function is:

    public static function drawGradientText(container:UIComponent, sourceText:Text, sourceTextX:Number, sourceTextY:Number, gradientStyleName:String)
    {
       // check text height and width as zero values will lead to an invalid bitmap error
   if ( (sourceText.height < 1) || (sourceText.width < 1) ) return;

       // create a bitmap version of text to be used as a stencil
       var bitmapData:BitmapData = new BitmapData(sourceText.width, sourceText.height, true, 0);
       // use a matrix when writing into the bitmap to preserve transparency
       bitmapData.draw(sourceText, new Matrix());
       // convert the bitmap data into an image object to be able to add it to the flex stage as a UI Component
       var bitmap:Bitmap = new Bitmap(bitmapData, "auto", true);
       var image:Image = new Image();
       image.source = bitmap;
       image.cacheAsBitmap = true;
       // object and mask have to be directly over each other on the stage
       image.x = sourceTextX;
       image.y = sourceTextY;
       // add to the stage
       container.addChild(image);
    
       // create a gradient with the same size as the text bitmap
       var gradientCanvas:GradientCanvas = new GradientCanvas();
       gradientCanvas.width = sourceText.width;
       gradientCanvas.height = sourceText.height;
       // object and mask have to be directly over each other on the stage
       gradientCanvas.x = sourceTextX;
       gradientCanvas.y = sourceTextY;
       // set gradient colors
       gradientCanvas.styleName = gradientStyleName;
       // make the gradient's vector art available as a bitmap in Flash
       gradientCanvas.cacheAsBitmap = true;
       // mask the gradient with the text stencil
       gradientCanvas.mask = image;
       // add to the stage
       container.addChild(gradientCanvas);
    }