UPDATE:
Version 3 is now available here

View Polar Clock

Download Screensaver for Mac OS X only.

I’ve just put this together as a bit of a test of some drawing API extensions I wrote a while ago. All the shapes are drawn with code, corner rounding curves are achieved using the ‘capStyle’ argument when setting the lineStyle, easy as that! The colour of each ring is based on an HSL colourwheel.

I was looking about for a C64 soundtrack today, from Last Ninja, and I found this.

First, you need SIDPlay (Universal for OSX) (c64 music was stored as .sid files), then download the massive High Voltage SID Collection.

SIDPlay will export to MP3/AIFF and even C64 executables (PRG).

Brings back some memories!!

Computers Behind Blogs pool on flickr.

I’ve been struggling, since my switch to OS X, to find a decent bitmap small font that is very readable and aliased for OS X.

Today I found ProFont, which is perfect in Eclipse if you set OS X to alias fonts <=10pt.

I’ve also found Anonymous, which is great if you don’t want to turn of anti-aliasing at smaller sizes, it looks great at 11pt.

Anyone else know a good font for OS X coders?

I’ve been using this for a long time now, it’s a debugger that runs in another SWF and is passed trace statements via my Debug class, with different levels or detail, info, warning, event, classinfo, error etc. It also has a runtime monitor graph at the bottom, the yellow line showing the current framerate, and the blue line showing the time it takes to execute all threads currently running in the Kernel class. The Kernel is basically a single onEnterFrame on a MovieClip in the _root, which runs through an array of threads, I simply have a getTimer() at either side of the thread execution and time it, this is a great way to view code-weight, especially when developing games or persistent enviornments such as physical engines.

I will make a public release of the Kernel, Thread and ThreadGroup classes soon, which will also include the debugger.

I’ve recently been doing some games work that required some pretty full on physics, after battling with vectors and collision reflection on wheels and other objects, I ditched what I had done and am now working with FlaDE (Flash Dynamics Engine) an AS 2.0 GPL Licensed API. It’s written by Alec Cove, and is very easy to use. It never went to final release, and he has now moved on to APE (ActionScript Physics Engine) which is written instead in AS 3.0 and is again GPL Licensed.

Just found this http://lab.mathieu-badimon.com/

Some serious work has gone into the vector-renderer under the bonnet of this one! Good stuff

This looks like a really handy tool for keeping a close (and detailed) eye on all your HTTP traffic. It deserializes SOAP, JSON, AMFPHP and other Flash Remoting traffic to a tree based format.

ServiceCapture for Windows and OS X.

[slug]DataTypedFlashVars[/slug]Patrick Mineault has an interesting approach to using flashVars and getting data typed objects passed into Flash.

A sane approach to FlashVars

I went down to the tate modern today, and spent quite a few hours playing on the slides, they are brilliant!

For more info, visit the Tate Modern site