Doin' the Sanibel Stoop

Just got back from a week with the family at Sanibel Island. We had a blast. Having most of my beach going experience on the "fairly sterile" mid-eastern seaboard, Sanibel came as a refreshing wave. This island is literally pummeled with seashells. So there is a lot to do learning about the different mollusks and the shells they create. The Sand, the sand is fine and white composed of what appears to be finely ground seashells. The snaps shown above are a few I took on the beach.

IPhone SDK

Ok... Even though I'm covered up with other projects. I had to give the IPhone SDK a try. A few hiccups along the way...

1. It requires Leopard. (OK, so I upgraded.)
2. To Deploy on an IPhone you have to have a developer cert.
$99 + some approval period (Still waiting...)
3. The simulator doesn't support OpenGLES :-( (Still waiting on my cert... )

Even with these issues still a lot to play with... The device is even sexier now that I'll be able to get code on it.

Thanks Steve!

ScreenJot

My ever popular screen capture utility. Screenjot is a tiny little memory resident screen capture utility that makes it easy to take a "picture" of what is on your screen at any given time. ScreenJot lets you capture the entire desktop, the contents of a specific window or a cropped section of the screen.

Find out more

pxCamera

pxCamera is a simple video camera capture class that layers on top of pxCore, my portable opensource framebuffer library. The design of pxCamera makes it well suited to do a variety of fun and interesting things with captured video frames - like computer vision or image processing applications.

The design of the pxCamera API followed a few principles as follows:

*Be Simple – Allows for enumeration of available capture devices and the ability to initiate capturing frames from a given camera into a pxBuffer(framebuffer).
*No UI Policy – Simple capture into a framebuffer. No UI is assumed.
*Support multiple capture sources simultaneously. [I’ve tested with two webcams] pxCamera should support any DirectShow compatible video source.
*Portable API – The API is portable even though the implementation is currently only for Windows.

Google Code Project Page
http://code.google.com/p/pxcamera

pxCore 1.2

I've made some minor additions to my portable open source framebuffer library, pxCore. Most of these additionals were added to support my little video capture library that I'll be posting in the near future. Some of the changes to pxCore include:

* Added the ability to directly blit pxBuffer frame buffer descriptors.
* Added beginNativeDrawing and endNativeDrawing to allow native drawing outside of the paint loop.
* Added an example that demonstrates using platform native drawing methods in conjunction with the portable frame buffer primitives in pxCore.

Google Code Project Page
http://code.google.com/p/pxcore

Johnny Lee Rocks

Here is another vid from Johnny Lee - Wii hacker extraordinaire. In this one he turns a wiimote into a multitouch display.





Some more projects

pxCore

pxCore is a small opensource library that provides a portable framebuffer and windowing abstraction for C++. This library is intended to hide the complexity of writing rasterization code on multiple platforms and allows you to easily write the following sorts of things in a portable way.

• 2d and 3d rasterizers
• Transition Libraries
• Filter Routines
• Image Processing
  

In its design a few principles were followed:

• Be Small – A simple windowed application can be built (on Windows) in as little as 8k.
• Be Simple – The framebuffer abstraction supports 32bpp framebuffers and is intended to be minimal yet complete.
• Don’t tightly couple the framebuffer and windowing functionality.- Some other framebuffer libraries (PixelToaster for one) don’t separate out the framebuffer abstraction from the windowing abstraction. By loosely coupling the two abstractions this library becomes much more valuable; as the framebuffer functionality can be used and integrated with other windowing toolkits easily thereby making YOUR code more reusable.
• Platform native surface construction
• Policy free resizing support – No policy is baked into the window resizing support so that applications completely control their own resizing behavior.
• Portable Keyboard, Mouse and Window events
• Support for portable performance timers
• Basic Animation Support – Support for a basic animation timer event (frames per second) is built into the windowing abstraction making it easy to write applications that animate their contents.

pxCore has been ported to Windows, pocketpc (arm4), linux(x11), OSX.

Google Code Project Page
http://code.google.com/p/pxcore/