With this aphorism in mind i decide to realize this simple application. The main problem comes out from all my producers friends, they always sent me aiff file when they need to let me listen something, that is very frustrating moving 60mb for a 5 minutes song.

I always had in mind to try this out, and with advent of Air 2.0 and Native Process, i had finally the chance to realize this.
(like usual someone did it before me .. so i must quote Thibault that basically use the same strategy on AS3 Lame Project.

Not going to much in depth, what i just do is calling the command line version of lame converter passing as parameter the kbps and path of the file i want to convert (or to be correct “encode” or “re-encode” in case the source file is an mp3 too)

Now let’z go straight to HOW TO USE IT:

- Download latest version of adobe AIR
- Install Adobe Air ( it will takes only few seconds, and for those who don’t know what air this, consider this installation not far different from the .NET framework any window user are used to)
- Download version according to your os of the converter: DMG FOR MAC , EXE FOR WINDOWS (comes shortly, just need to recompile the native installer on a window machine)
- Install the converter
- Enjoy

Following few screenshots:

As you can see, program running gui is not intrusive, you can keep above any software without problems.

Just press the O logo (o stands for Open .. smart isn’t it ?! ) and you will prompt with the “choose file” window

You can easily change bitrate of encoding by right-click the icon on dock (or system tray on window)

After choosing file, the gui expands to let you know the progress of the conversion. Just press the C logo (c stand for conversion) and …

.. conversion starts .. should takes few seconds even if it’s pretty fast (circa 40 seconds for a 4 minutes aiff on my quad), converted files are saved on desktop with a -converted suffix

Special tnx goes to:

The lame Project
Siwell (Producer) now he should stop sending me Aiff big files.. no excuses
Ableton Live Keep produce great software folks!
Future upgrade:
Even if this is a one-day project, i would like to keep it going in case there will be some buzz around it, so any request are welcome, just drop me a comment

Enjoy the conversions!

Ok, for those who don’t know this year, tnx to my boss i’m going to attend Flash On the Beach, that is, for those who don’t know the most inspired conference world wide for flash lovers (less formal and more exciting sessions).

There is also a little small big thing to add… i was picked as elevator pitchers … a 3 minutes shots preso in wich i will show something (hope cool) in front of a stage of 1000 flash developer …. sounds scarring? yes it is!
( i will come back later with some post on the work in progress of the presentation )

But now let me show off my TODO LIST for FOTB!

People I MUST meet!
Ok you know, community isn’t so big, but conference are great moment to meet people live, that is far away from exchanging mails or skype messages. Like every year, fotb is full of AS3 heros, and flash ecosystem great guys. This is my personal list (still upgrading … damn i think it’s quite impossible to have the same concentration of flash hero in the same place) :

Thibault Imbert

he’s simply alivepdf creator, bytearray proud pioneer, and recently was moved into flash player team….. nothing to add. Must give him, the printed version of the poster i did. I also expected some proof of his training to be a real geeky flash developer ( he should talk with a light saber instead of an usual laser pointer), i hope Mike Chambers keep controlling him on this.

Keith Peters

Well just let me say minimalcomps.com. A project i used tons of time, a rising solid kit for superfast prototyping … i going few times throu customizing that components, and i’m sure a talk with the creator will open my mind to cool fresh ideas.

Andre Michelle

Another god in flash world, we remember him for the make some noise project, but till that time he’s keep moving on with such great ideas .. and hey … looks like he have a great music taste too !

Joa Ebert

Ok, i’m following him since his previous blog posts over CI and other Software Engineer topic that at the end it’s exactly what i’m focus one. I’m sure there will be lot to learn from him!!

Topics!
Even if the official session topics aren’t published yet, i’m sure there will be great topics to discuss over. This year my hot topics are:

CS5 Integration
from the early studies looks like the cs5 sdk let us do such great things with as3 and the entire suit programms, so will be cool to know how deep we can get into this new toy

air 2.0 and 10.1
Everytime there is new release of flash player and air you can bet there are new feature that at the first time you don’t notice … Live listening the project team talking over this topic will open up our mind and give us a unpayable advance!

Automated Processes

This is an advance topic, and i have lot to learn in this field. It’s all about integrating enterprise tools to turn flash into a solid developer solution even for high level business projects.

Beach Experience!

No, i’m not planning some beach time, there will not be time for that. Beach experience is just about feelings.. sharing … learn .. growing… i know that it sounds strange if you never come to FOTB, but i’m sure that all attenders, at least one time, they perfectly know what i mean

see you at FOTB : Brighton 26-29 September!

Adobe Air Api interaction and the software development process was off course the picked topic!
I decided to recreate the well know (off course for the mac users only ) photo booth. If you are a window user or a linux user, you will find in this application probably a good replacement to the lack on your platform (however keep in consideration the idea to switch to mac).

Back to the submission, some interesting consideration on the workflow behind the realization:

1) Custom Interface.

I’m a flash developer, and i’m still convinced that the Catalyst – Flash Builder workflow isn’t optimized enought, so i prefeared to go straight to the old couple Photoshop + Flash cs4.

The entire design process took me around 3 hours. Including the logotype, the icon and the gui. I divided all in a well organized layers and groups,avoiding the use of masks and trying to keep in mind that i would import all in flash. Should sounds really exciting the small amount of hours needed for this phase, and the optimization on the import of the psd file (filters and text i still editable after import) is really useful, this is the props of having a giant as adobe behind, and looking to the cs5 preview looks like the path on integration inside creative suite will rise to an higher level. Perfect!

2) AIR features

For those who don’t know air bring the as3 knowledge from flash player to the desktop runtime, in few words, bring the web on your desktop. In this case we take advance also of the additional api that air offer, in particular the possibilities of interact with the operative system (open, reading and writing files), and the chance to drag file from application to desktop.

The first is quite common to all the air developer, if you are interesting on how to interact with the filesystem just take a look to the flash.filesystem package, and you will easily find how streams works in air.
The second feature is a little bit tricky, since usually all the use case assume that the user drag a file from the desktop to the application, and rarely the viceversa, i spend a bit of time on finding a solution to let the user drag the thumbs inside the software to desktop, or every window that display a directory, transforming the image in a jpg valid file.
Clipboard object helped me a lot on doing this! Clipboard object is much useful that I initially suppose to be; paring with the bytearray can esily take you to another level!

3) Image manipulation!
this is probably the hot spot of the application, bitmap manipulation pixel by pixel. The main object in the as3 to handle pixels is BitmapData. This class has build in methods for creation and manipulation pixel data.
This will let us:

Manipulate each Pixel with getPixel(x,y) setPixel(x,y) getPixels(rect:Rectangle) returns a ByteArray, setPixels(rect:Rectangle,bytes:ByteArray).

Copying Pixels with clone(), copyPixels(), copyChannel(), draw()

Other interesting things such as applyFilter(), colorTransform(), compare(), and the cool treshold().

This will help us creating such interesting filter, that reproduce lots of the most famous photoshop’s filters. I promise i will come back on this topic since there’s lot of interesting things to do with pixels.
After manipulating pixmap data, you feel the needs to store in a bitmap with the draw(), and save it to an useful file for the user.
Adobe developed officially a library that apply the jpg encoding process to bitmap, returning a byteArray. For sure i will come back on this to a specific topic.

4) Update manager system

This take me the longer time. I tried to implemented the ApplicationUpdater included in the 1.5 release of adobe Air, but i quickly felt uncomfortable, at the end i result with my own vision of an application update manager.
In short we should:

1. Determine the update version string for your application (the new version you will be updating to)
2. Download the correct version of that AIR application to local computer (preferably in the application resource directory)
3. Create an instance of the Updater class
4. Call the update method of the Updater class
5. AIR will shut down your AIR application, install the new version, and then restart the application

5) The missing list
I decided to release the 1.0 version without some interesting featuring i planned at the begin such Video recording, mashup with social networks for direct upload, preview of thumbs into application, and so on.
They are all on the to do list, and probably will comes in the future release, and any other requests are welcome

This article cover a little part of the entire process, but it should give you an overall idea of developing on the flash platform.

Following the link to the application. Adobe air 1.5 runtime is needed.

The base concept, as “Bitwise” may suggest, is to use the bit representation of the number.
A number can be represented in an infinite number of ways. The representation we are used to is called decimal, or base 10.
The binary, or base 2, number system is the one that computers use to represent numbers in memory. Since we’re dealing with base 2, there are only two digits available, namely 0 and 1. Each digit is multiplied by successive powers of two to obtain the number’s overall value.

Following some of the useful/interesting implementation of the art of handle bit.

Moltiplication and Division by 2 (or multiple of 2)

bitwise left and right shift

// this is the normal way to divide or moltiply y for a multiple of
// 2 (0,1,2,4,8...)

y *= 2^x;
y /= 2^x;

// this is the bitwise way to divide or moltiply,
// note that the X is the number of positions to shift the number

y <<= x // Moltiplication by 2^x
y >>= x // Division by 2^x

Even if is possible only to moltiply/divide number by 0,1,2,4,8,16 and so on, consider that the bitwise function is faster up to 3.5 times of the usual one.

Cast using bitshift

Since the bitwise operation results in an integer value (int or uint) we can use the bitshifter also for casting Number to int (uint)
This is 10% fastwer of the normal casting. This also can be used to emulate the math.floor on a double

// Normal casting
x = int(1.232)

// casting with bitshifting
x = 1.232 >> 0;

Swapping int with the Xor Operator ( ^ )

The Exclusive disjunction, also called exclusive or (symbolized XOR or EOR), is a type of logical disjunction on two operands that results in a value of true if exactly one of the operands has a value of true. A simple way to state this is “one or the other but not both, but i’m sure you still know this. What probably you don’t is this advance and smart use of the XOR.

Assume that x and y are two int (uint) already sets.

x = x ^ y;          //  x is equal to x^y       y is equal to y
y = x ^ y;          //  x is equal to x^y       y is equal to (x ^ y )^ y == x
x = x ^ y;          // x is equal to (x ^ x) ^ y  == y     y is equal to x

like explained in the comment you actually swap two variables without using an auxiliar one and this is also 1.4x times faster!

Other interesting operations

The modulo operator (%) can be easily replaced by an additive mask (with the AND “&” operator).
In other words, the number we need to use as our mask in order to perform a modulus operation on 2n is simply 2n – 1. To illustrate this, the following pairs of statements are all equivalent to one another:

x = y % 8;
x = y & 7;

x = y % 32;
x = y & 31;

x = y % 256;
x = y & 255;

The only difference is that using the mask is 6x faster than the normal modulo.
For the same reason, using this way do determinate if a number is Even or Pair is much faster!

isEven = (i & 1) == 0;  // if i is even return true, elsewhere false.

the following one is probably the best one on encreasing performance side, it is 25x faster than the original Math.abs()

//version 1
i = x << 0 ? -x : x;
//version 2
i = (x ^ (x >> 31)) - (x >> 31);

Comparing two integers for equal sign

eqSign = a ^ b >= 0;

Sign flipping using NOT or XOR

i = ~i + 1;
//or
i = (i ^ -1) + 1

Bitmasks Theory

So what masks are? they are exactly what you think they are, a way for masking something and show the rest. There are mainly 3 functions on using bitmask:

Masking bits to 1
To turn certain bits on, the bitwise OR operation can be used.Knowing that Y OR 1 = 1 and Y OR 0 = Y. Therefore, to make sure a bit is on, OR can be used with a 1. To leave a bit unchanged, OR is used with a 0.

Masking bits to 0
To change a bit from on to off using the OR operation bitwise AND is used. When a value is ANDed with a 1, the result is simply the original value, as in: Y AND 1 = Y. However, ANDing a value with 0 is guaranteed to return a 0, so it is possible to turn a bit off by ANDing it with 0: Y AND 0 = 0. To leave the other bits alone, ANDing them with a 1 can be done.

Querying the status of a bit
It is possible to use bitmasks to easily check the state of individual bits regardless of the other bits. To do this, turning off all the other bits using the bitwise AND is done as discussed above and the value is compared with 0. If it is equal to 0, then the bit was off, but if the value is any other value, then the bit was on. What makes this convenient is that it is not necessary to figure out what the value actually is, just that it is not 0.

So for exemple if you want to know the value for the 5th bit of a 8-bit number just AND it with a 00010000 mask.

Bitmasks Implementations in as3

The main havy use of bitwise operation in as3 is refeared on handling color data.
As you probably know there are mainly two type of colour on flash the 24 bit (with 3 channel, and 8bit (255 value) for each color channel) and the 32 bit (that add the Alpha channel with its 8 bit value). Working with colors can be really painfull if you don’t keep in mind that they are only bits! So forget substring doublets, forget the 10-base arithmetic and start using what you learn on the lines above.

// EXTRACTING COMPONENTS
//24bit
var color:uint = 0x336699;
var r:uint = color >> 16;
var g:uint = color >> 8 & 0xFF;
var b:uint = color & 0xFF;

//32bit
var color:uint = 0xff336699;
var a:uint = color >> 24;
var r:uint = color >> 16 & 0xFF;
var g:uint = color >>  8 & 0xFF;
var b:uint = color & 0xFF;

// COMBINING  COMPONENTS
//24bit
var r:uint = 0x33;
var g:uint = 0x66;
var b:uint = 0x99;
var color:uint = r << 16 | g << 8 | b;

//32bit
var a:uint = 0xff;
var r:uint = 0x33;
var g:uint = 0x66;
var b:uint = 0x99;
var color:uint = a << 24 | r << 16 | g << 8 | b;