jun :: realeyes

What do you get when you mix bad ass Denver metro speakers, a rockin’ club, and an intermission band complete with IPhone, Adobe AIR, Merapi, miditoflash, Twitter, FreeTTS, and MMJ?  A rockin’ good time at Ignite Denver 4!

So come check out all the bad-ass presentations like “Zombie Attack Best Practices” or “Social Network Analysis for Dummies” and during the intermission you will see the latest and greatest build of The Compilers Live Set Alpha 0.2…oh yeah!

For those of you that don’t know us, here’s a previous blog post, and for those of you that do,  we’re just getting warmed up and this live set is gonna rock all over the last one.

Get registered, and see you there!

Also, thanks to Eric Matthys for creating this really cool flyer for our set, you da man Eric!

P.S. – If you want to be an active, real-time contributor to Live Set Alpha 0.2, don’t forget to bring your mobile internet device with ya!

We really enjoyed playing at the Denver Next Gen Flex Tour last week.  We were honored to open for Kevin Hoyt, he is one of the best speakers out there!

For those of you new to The Compilers, we’re a band of Flex developers and we allow Adobe technologies and IPhone take an active role in our set.  We are all about being lazy and making use of all the wonderful apps and API out there.  Some of the things we used in Live set Alpha 0.1 were:

• Adobe AIR
• IPhone
  
• Merapi
• BEBOT (Check out The Compiler’s own BEBOT player’s blog about this and All Your Base)
• All Your Base
• miditoflash
• FreeTTS (Shout out to Rich Tretola for getting me started)
• MMJ
• Twitterscript
• AS3 Gif Player Class 0.3

Each API was hand picked to allow us to pump up the nerdum.  The funniest part was needing to work out some kinks and coding up to 5 minutes before the set.  The show was also the first time I’ve taken both my guitar and my laptop up on stage together.

Anyway, I’d like to show you a quick montage, embedded below.

There’s three clips, here’s the technology breakdown in each one:

1. AllYourBase: The All Your Base IPhone app was used during this song, in addition, all the screenshots of Zero Wing played in AIR via the AS3 Gif Player Class.
2. TweetJam: People twittered @thecompilers which was read into AIR using twitterscript.  The the text was sent to Java using Merapi and spoken by the FreeTTS engine, this was happening realtime as we played the song.   Also, Eric had a BEBOT IPhone solo during this song.
3. DoYouReallyWantToHurtMe: This utilized the AS3 Gif Player Class to run an animated Gif I created for the WTF?? feeling during our extended jam. [NOTE: Scary, scary visuals during this part of the montage]
   

As a last little info tidbit, I used Merapi, miditoflash, and MMJ to send input from my foot controller – a Behringer FCB1010 – to the AIR app.  This is what let me change between different content types and run modes in our player while both my hands were in use on the guitar.

So, here’s the montage, and if you feel like checking out what’s new in Live Set Alpha 0.2 come check us out during intermission at Ignite Denver 4!

The Compilers @ The Adobe Next Gen Tour from Jun Heider on Vimeo.

As I work on my presentation for CFUnited, I’m realizing that the last discount for those that haven’t registered is coming to a close on Tuesday, June 30th.  So between now and then will be the last chance for you to save anywhere from $50-100.

Here’s the registration page: http://register.cfunited.com/go/register/step1#current-step

See you there!

I had a really enjoyable conversation on the Flash Builder 4 Profiler with Jeff and John of the The Flex Show earlier this month.  It’s been posted today if you want to take a listen: http://www.theflexshow.com/blog/index.cfm/2009/6/24/The-Flex-Show-Episode-80-Interview-with-Jun-Heider-about-Performance-Tuning-Flex

While you’re there, make sure to check out the list of profiling and debugging references on the podcast page and while you’re here, a couple more links on the Profiler to check out:

1. If you want to vote for or check up on some Profiler enhancement requests: http://www.iheartair.com/?p=233

2. Here’s a bunch of profiling links I’ve run across on the net: http://delicious.com/yosaburo/profiler

Tonight The Compilers will be opening for Kevin Hoyt at the Next Generation Flex and ColdFusion tour.  This will be the first show of a band that’s been together since April Fool’s day this 2009.  We’re the house band ya’ll and we’re mighty excited to be opening for one of the pimpest Technical Evangelists out there.

That being said, we’re please to announce that not only will we be rockin’ the house but we’ll also be dabbling with all kinds of tech goodness during our set.  We’re planning to have an interactive part within the set and if you want to take part, this is what you’ll need:

1. Bring your mobile internet and/or texting device (iPhone, gPhone, Razr, whatever)

2. Follow our band @thecompilers on Twitter

3. Also, we have some other shows we’re finalizing, so if you want to keep updated, feel free to friend us on MySpace or fan us on Facebook.

Text’rs and Twitter’ers come on down! We’re playing from 6:30pm to 7pm so be there on time to help us “Pump up the Nerdum!”

I’m really excited to annouce that I’ll be speaking at the first InsideRIA conference!

Spun off of the InsideRIA O’Reilly blog, and mixed in with a little Wilker and Ortega mojo, this is going to be an outstanding conference that knows no bounds when it comes to RIA platforms.  Whether it’s Flex, Silverlight, JavaFX, AJAX, you name it, it’s all fair game when it comes to InsideRIA topics.

So what am I going to be speaking about?  Here’s what I submitted to call for papers:

Title: Silverlight – First Impressions – Through the Eyes of a Flex Developer

Level: Level 200 (Flex) | Level 100 (Silverlight)

Track: Development
Description:
Are you a Flex developer with an inkling to see what the dark side is like?  During this session the porting of an application from Flex to Silverlight will be discussed through the eyes of a seasoned Flex developer with no prior Silverlight experience. The main focus of this session will be to show you how a Flex developer got started with Silverlight and things and thoughts encountered during the process.

So get registered and see you in August…San Jose here we come!

I just purchased and started playing around with a Behringer FCB1010 MIDI Foot Controller.  While trying to find out what it could do other than send note and volume information, I ran across a post about GarageRemote.

The thing that intrigued me about the post is that it mentioned that it “converts MIDI sysex & CC messages” and what sold me was the screen cap shown on the GarageRemote site…rewind, play, record, really?  As a guitar player that likes to record to my PC, I’ve been hoping for a hands-free punch-in/punch-out, rewind and play for a while now.

So…I have the hardware, I have the software, but how to make it work.  I opened GarageBand, started the GarageRemote listener, and connected my FCB1010.  Right out of the gate none of the default mappings were working.  So I opened up the MIDILogger utility that comes with GarageRemote and did a little tinkering around.  I found out that I had to use the MIDI sysex commands to get it to work and this is how I decided to configure it:

• GarageBand “Record” Button – Pedal #10 – MIDI Sysex HEX#F0 00 20 32 01 0C 00 09 F7
• GarageBand “Play” Button – Pedal #9 – MIDI Sysex HEX#F0 00 20 32 01 0C 00 08 F7
• GarageBand “Rewind to 00:00:00″ Button – Pedal #7 – MIDI Sysex HEX#F0 00 20 32 01 0C 00 07 F7

One difference I noticed between issuing the record and play commands from the FCB1010 is that play will toggle between playing and stopping, whereas record will start and stop the recording but when the recording is stopped the audio will continue to play until you click on the play button. (Which is not too big of a deal since I just need to make sure it stops recording.)  Oh, and the rewind to 00:00:00 works like a champ!

Here’s a screenshot for those that are interested.

Using the FCB1010 and GarageRemote to control GarageBand

I’m starting to really enjoy conditional breakpoints in Flash Builder 4.  They take a little getting used to, but once you start getting the hang of them, they’re a very helpful tool to speed up your debugging.

Here’s a demonstration on how to use them.  Also, if you noticed, I had slapped together the code in a couple of minutes to run this demo, needless to say, there were a couple of things that needed be tweaked.  Anyway, if you want the source to run this demo on your own it’s available as a zipped Flex 4 project export (FXP) here –> http://www.iheartair.com/samples/screencast_assets/ConditionalBreakpointDemo.fxp.zip

Just note, if you pull the project source down, you’ll need to extract the zip file to get to the FXP.

Enjoy the video!

Conditional Breakpoints in Flash Builder 4 from Jun Heider on Vimeo.

Rocky Mountain Adobe Camp is this coming Monday, 6/22.  There’s a couple seats left in the dynamic media track.  Come check out myself and Mr. FMS give  a presso on Enterprise Encoding & Encrypting  covering both Flash Media Encoding Server and Flash Media Rights Management Server.

Oh, and if you register anytime before Thursday morning, you can get in at a discounted rate of $50.  Not only will you get our session, but other bad-ass sessions covering all things Dynamic Media. Also, there will be a copy of Adobe CS 4 Production Premium given away if that will help wet the appetite.

But hey, don’t just take it from me.  Take it from the RMAC team

So get registered!