UnitZeroOne

I normally don't delve into book reviews or endorsements; and I won't go there just yet with this post. But I do want to get your attention for the first released Papervision3D book; Papervision3D Essentials.

Written by Jeff Winder and Paul Tondeur, this elaborate, 13 chapter book looks great for anyone wanting to learn or deepen their knowledge of the Papervision3D API and Engine. Congratulations to both authors for getting it released! Great job!

Although I haven't recieved my ([total disclosure] free, thank you guys), copy for review yet, the book looks promising, if you can judge it by these two free online chapters, about Lines3D and VectorVision.

As one of the core members of Papervision3D and having architectured and written rather large portions of the Papervision 2 Engine, for me personally it's amazing to see a project like this. It's documenting code that the team has been writing over the years and getting it on paper, along with an explanation and examples is something huge to me, as well as being huge for people wanting to start or already experienced with the engine! Having recieved multiple mails full of questions and additional bug fixes (as have other members of the team) from Paul and Jeff, I can assure they have been thorough in reviewing & examplifying the Papervision code base.

In a way, that's a very odd feeling; an obscure function which might have been thought up and written at 2pm at night (which during the initial dev of Papervision3D 1.7, 1.9 and 2.0 was rule, rather then exception), might now have gotten an explanation in the book.

One thing the project has been lacking the most though, was a paper resource to look things up; and that has now arrived!

I will blog a more thorough review after having recieved and read the book. Can't wait to see this book as a piece of tangible material and actually hold it!

[UPDATE]

Another free chapter has emerged as PDF. Chapter 8; modelling and importing to Papervision3D.

Microsoft released Silverlight 3. So it's time for Silverlight on my Flash blog ? Heresy ?  No, not really.

I'm not going to do an intro to Silverlight here, I guess you all know what it is, or what it is proposed to be. As a developer, I'm naturally interested in platforms available to me or in a similar area to what I work in. Therefore, Silverlight has my attention. Not because I believe it's a Flash killer, not because I think a bag of Microsofts cash will come my way, not because I want to destroy Silverlight, but because it's a technology which plays in the same realm as my professional environment. Surely being Flash Platform developer, I'm biased. The platform that has allowed me to earn my professional living and have so much fun is clearly my favorite any day. But let's have a look anyway.

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I just stumbled upon this very short TED talk by Chris Hughes. In his presentation Chris Hughes shows of an "Augmented Reality demo using Adobe Flash!". In an exited tone he talks about how he wrote a piece of software (!) to allow the replacement of a "2D Barcode" with something "really, really cool" using nothing but Adobe Flash!

In reality he hardly wrote any software, rather did he do a pretty standard and in my opinion a very ugly implementation of Papervision3D and FLARToolkit, for which tutorials can be found online quite easily.

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