At a glance, you can now tell if there are free bikes or spaces.

This pin means there are no bikes / spaces, or the status is unknown.

This means there are no bikes, only spaces (which can indicate out of service)

This means there are only bikes available, no spaces to leave your bike

This means there are both bikes and spaces.

Scan with your android barcode reader or search "London Cycle Hire LIVE" in the android market.

Although I can’t guarantee which features will come first, the order given here is an indication of their current priority. I’ll be adding these features in my spare time so please bear with me, I’ll be working to get them done as soon as possible!

1. On map status (live indication of bikes and bike slots shown directly on the map)
2. Location search (find the nearest bike rack to a given address)
3. A to B route planning (find the best way to navigate from address A to address B using the cycle hire network, with a ‘keep my journey free’ option)
4. Find nearest available bike / nearest available bike space (this feature will search for the nearest available bike / bike space in walking distance, rather than how the crow flies, and show you how to get there)
5. Haptic directions (navigation provided via vibrations, with option to autoroute to free space when free time period is up)

Scan with your android barcode reader or search "London Cycle Hire LIVE" in the android market.

Along with a large number of tweaks this release now includes the ability to set a vibrate notification when starting the timer. You can choose to be notified between 1 and 25 minutes before the free period ends, giving you chance to find a docking station before getting charged!

Get it now for only £1!

Scan with your android barcode reader or search "London Cycle Hire LIVE" in the android market.

The Timer Screen

The Reminder Options

Scan with your android barcode reader or search "London Cycle Hire LIVE" in the android market.

Big thanks to http://twitter.com/pauljames for all his technical support.

Looking forward to the city.

But will miss this, a lot.

Living and working in Australia has been awesome, I’ve had the opportunity to work with some excellent companies like http://www.massive.com.au/ and more recently the Über creative http://www.hollersydney.com.au whilst enjoying one of the best cities in the world.

From a work perspective I’ll be back online from September, continuing to work with Flash and hopefully moving into iPhone development. If all things go according to plan I’ll also have a portfolio site up and running by then. In the mean time if you’re in London and looking for a senior Interactive Developer come September then please, post a comment.

I will certainly miss the job, lifestyle and friends I’ve had in Sydney but right now I’m getting pretty stoked about life in London and a chance to see old friends and family.

Until then.

Dope Awards - yes please.

So, our creative director http://between0and1.wordpress.com has just come across http://www.dopeawards.com as we got a ‘recognition’ for 6 beers (sweeeet!!). I’m thinking this might make a welcome change to the now ‘video heavy’ http://thefwa.com . Funny thing is, dope awards looks a lot like the fwa of yester-year – anybody else noticed this?

Full Quality Texture and Stage

I recently finished a 3D ‘metropolis’ in Papervision, and had a lot of fun doing so, although to be honest – I was rather disappointed with the performance. Given the time frame (just over three weeks) I’ve no doubt there’s room for improvement in my code, but I’d really hoped for more. I should be clear that I’m not criticising Papervision, or Flash – but developers need to be aware of the technologies limitations (I wasn’t) before signing off on a brief . Still, if you’ve already made it that far, below is a list of the most significant performance boosts I used to get past the finish line;

StageQuality; I was horrified about the idea of reducing stage quality – but the truth is, reducing the stage quality whilst a 3D animation takes place is a big plus for the frame rate and hard to spot in terms of quality. Thanks to http://www.julapy.com/blog/ for that one.

Low Texture and Stage Quality

Texture size; If you’re going to use movie clips as textures you should note that performance is directly proportional to the clip size. As with StageQuality reducing texture size whilst making a transition pumps up the frame rate without being noticeable. Another big plus of variable texture quality is the ability to zoom in on a 3D texture without it becoming pixelated. To vary the textures quality I added it to a parent container; this way Papervision can use the scaled width and height without messing up the UV mappings;

…

_textureClip.scaleX = _textureClip.scaleY = TEXTURE_QUALITY;

var bitmapMe : Sprite = new Sprite();

bitmapMe.addChild(_textureClip);

_movieMaterial = new MovieMaterial(bitmapMe, useAlpha, false, false, new Rectangle(0,0,512*TEXTURE_QUALITY,512*TEXTURE_QUALITY));

…

Low texture quality

Animation; The performance hit generated when animating textures is the most significant of all settings – I didn’t use it freely on any of my textures. Instead I enabled animation if and only if the texture had update. The simplest example of this being button rollovers . By animating the texture when the button is rolled over, and disabling again once the movie clip animation is finished you get a big change in overall performance. To this end all of my 3D display objects extended a single class that would call (usually via a timer/enter frame as animations took place);

movieMaterial.drawBitmap();

In the end though I did have a lot of fun with Papervision, Blender and the rest - but next time I tackle something like this I’ll do so with these limitations in mind.

Bookmark:

]]> http://blog.ifuller1.info/?feed=rss2&p=70 3 http://blog.ifuller1.info/?p=64 http://blog.ifuller1.info/?p=64#comments Mon, 02 Feb 2009 04:50:12 +0000 Ian Fuller http://flashmonkey.servehttp.com/wordpress/?p=64

I’ve been lucky enough to spend the last few weeks working on a cover designer for the Australian addition of FHM. Although there was the obvious challenges of looking at scantily clad women all day long, there was also the chance to work with some great designs and concepting.

FHM Recovered

As with previous work I’ve made heavy use of bitmap data and bitmap distortion. What increased my love for BitmapData in this instance was the merging of timeline based animation and the bitmap distortion class. By inserting distorted bitmap grabs into timeline animation you can get some really excellent results; If you head over to fhmrecovered.com.au and check out the amateur section, and then preview the cover (magnifying glass) you’ll see the sweet timeline animation with the visual assets inserted and distorted.

Given the introduction of fp10 I imagine we’ll be seeing even greater teamwork between both flash designers, and flash developers over the coming months, and based on my experience with FHM this can only lead to great things.

Should you be based in Australia then please have a go at entering fhmrecovered.com.au as the winner takes a prize of $5000 and a week’s internship at hollersydney.com.au (I’ll be after a 10% cut )

bats_01 from lukasz on Vimeo

An interactive version of the bats are going to be on show at the Holler Christmas party (sweet!).

Motor2 Physics in action

In the rush to get things off the ground quickly I tried APE, FOAM and Motor2 to see which engine could most easily give me what I was after. APE is actually particle based (although you can form rigid bodies by combining particles) so that went straight out of the window. Next up was FOAM which was easy to implement and did everything I needed, but had a terrible case of the jitters. Each time a number of rigid bodies came together they would start shaking – this also happens with the examples so wasn’t specific to my implementation. Finally I tried Motor2, and although it was a bit more difficult to implement it did exactly what I was after.

So, in short, if you need rigid body physics in one of your projects, take a look at Motor2.