Fixing the Windows 7 64bit Preview Pane for PDFs

I installed Windows 7 64bit edition a few weeks ago and I’m loving it. But one of the things that’s been bugging me for ages is that the “Preview Pane” doesn’t recognise PDFs, even with a full version of Adobe Acrobat installed. As I have a quite a lot of PDFs on my hard drive I sometimes have to plough through them all individually to find the one that I want…but if the preview pane was working properly my working life would be a heck of a lot more efficient.

But now I’ve found the fix…and it’s an easy one… Read the rest of this post >

Fun with Partigen pt.1

I recently downloaded a copy of Partigen 2, the latest version of the outstanding particle engine by Desuade. To say that I’m impressed would be an understatement.

Not only is the engine now written in Actionscript 3 and available as open source code, the full paid-for version comes with an amazingly easy to use Flash extension panel which allows you to create particle effects in literally seconds. The smoking example above took less than a minute to create (not including the time it took to crop the photo and import it into flash).

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Merry Christmas!

Apologies for not updating the site for a couple of months, I’ve had quite a hectic last quarter. Lots of exciting new AS3 bits that I hope to put online in the early part of 2010, an entirely new plagro.com (some of the code will be posted here) will hopefully go live in the first quarter and also I’ll be posting a few jquery/javascript nuggets that I’ve come across in the last couple of months as soon as I get chance.

So all there is to do now is to wish you all a very Merry Christmas…and a very happy new year. Have a good one!

The Hippy

Pixel perfection in Papervision3D

I’ve been tearing my hair out for the last 24 hours trying to work out how the hell to get my precisely drawn design to scale correctly in Papervision. Anyone who’s tried this will know that it’s a frustrating blend of messing around with camera zoom, focus and field of view. But try as I might, I found it absolutely impossible to solve. I had come to the end of my patience and was ready to give up with PV3D and change the design completely…

…and then I came across this.

The thing that crossed my mind first when seeing this demo was “not only is it possible to reproduce a good pixel perfect 2D design in Papervision, but potentially it could be really great”.

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A new era for Papervision3D

So one of the things that I didn’t discuss in my last Flash on the Beach post is that on the Wednesday afternoon, Ralph Hauwert announced that he was leaving the Papervision3D team. This came as quite a shock to everyone other than the team itself. I wasn’t at the session when he made the announcement but apparently he stated the reason for his leaving is purely so that he can spend more time on other projects and had nothing to do with his relationship with the Papervision3D team – this is also backed up in his recent blog post.

Ralph leaving has caused quite a ripple amongst the community and I can completely understand why. Alongside Tim Knip, Ralph designed the majority of the PV3D engine and the release of Papervision X (the next gen ground-up build) was reliant on them completing it together. The following quote from Ralph’s blog backs up my concerns…

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