RIAdventure Inspiration

english mobile

So we're just back from the RIAdventure cruise/conference, and I have to say it was just what the doctor ordered for me. The speakers and attendees were all top notch, and I felt like a little sponge, soaking up ideas from them.



One set of ideas I'd just started reading about before going to the conference was blitting. In my roles as eLearning or Application developer, this wasn't something that I'd been exposed to much. And it seemed like a lot to get my head around until I saw Sam Rivello's Las Viditas presentation. He made this stuff look so easy, I thought maybe it wasn't so hard after all.



Couple that with the fact that I was inspired by Greg Burch's presentation to try an iPhone teaching app for children that needs to have performant animation (when the iPhone api is available), and suddenly this looked like something I needed to learn.



But since the main animation I was concerned with was rotating an object about a central point, the whole idea of repeatedly copying the pixels from different parts of an image seemed to be silly to me. So I came up with the idea of using a Flash Display object and rotating it once, programmatically, taking a snapshot at each rotation increment. Then each snapshot could be used in sequence.



Here's my first prototype of that concept:





Download the source code.

I'll probably write in detail about this code on InsideRIA in the near future, but the code is commented pretty thoroughly.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Glad to see you are playing around with blitting. It is a really important concept to learn and something that can be applied to a lot of different things. Most people use them for game but I have used blitting as a replacement to using scroll rect and to fix some of the tearing issues to get when quickly scrolling large graphics. I am working on top secret project that heavily relies on blitting right now and it is one of my favorite things to code.

Good luck with the new technique and feel free to ask me questions.

Unknown said...

Glad to see the conference was inspiring :). I always love the excitement of learning something new at a conference then coming home and playing with it. I love the sound of your iPhone app idea, can't wait to see it when its finished.