Posts filed under 'Flash'
Woohoooo, it’s finally done!!! I finally got my Thumb Grid Flash component out on the site for sale. I’m really excited about this component as it is the first one I’ve released in almost a year. The component is really useful and I hope to have lots more examples posted in the next few days/weeks. I’m even planning on putting together a video tutorial oh how to use the component.
I think the coolest part is that it works really well with SlideshowPro (http://www.slideshowpro.net) and Soundslides (http://www.soundslides.com)
It’s really easy to implement and I hope to show that with my video tutorial.
The XML schema should be very familiar to most people. There are also over 30 component inspector parameters so you should really be able to tweak to your hearts content.
This is a component I really wish was included in the included component set, it is in flex 2.0, so I think it fills a definite need for a bunch of different apps.
November 4th, 2006
I was invited to attend the Mountain Workshops in Madisonville Kentucky from October 14 - 20th. I regard this opportunity as a real honor and I really would like to thank Ken Harper from the Rocky Mountain News for making this all happen. I will be speaking on Saturday after Joe Weiss from SoundSlides in the Flash session “Expose yourself online, how to integrate flash into your daily workflow”.
Post Workshop Update:
Well, it’s been a couple of weeks after the workshop, but there are still updates happening almost every day to the site. Probably the thing I’m most excited about is the fact that this website is almost completely indexable by the search engines. I’m using a combination of SWFObject from Geoff Stearns (http://blog.deconcept.com/swfobject/) and my own PHP/XML/MYSQL mashup. If you hit the page with your javascript turned off, you can see the alternative HTML that gets indexed. What’s really cool is that you can actually turn your javascript back on and click one of the links and you will be taken into the flash site. I’m using flashvars to pass in a variable and load the corresponding section and content. This is probably the best site I’ve produced in some time with the help of some amazing people including Ken Harper, Chad Stevens, Joe Weiss, and everyone else who contributed the amazing content.
All said and done, working 18 hour days at a minimum for 7 days straight took me another week just to recuperate, but it was definitely worth it and I fully expect to do it again next year.
October 20th, 2006
The PNG problem in Windows Internet Explorer (IE)
I have run into this problem several times over the past couple of years and each time I looked for a sexy CSS/Javascript solution. I realized a while back that there might be an easier solution using flash. It’s very easy, very flexible, and I really think it might be the best way to handle this situation.
1. Create your PNG
2. Create a flash file the same dimensions as your PNG.
3. Add the following actionscript to the first frame of the first layer in the flash movie:
createEmptyMovieClip(”icon_mc”, 1);
if(_root[’icon’]){
icon_mc.loadMovie(_root[’icon’]);
}
4. publish your flash movie
5. use the swfobject javascript code to add the flash file to your html page
6. set the wmode to transparent and use “addVariable” to specify the path to your png file
so.addParam(”wmode”, “transparent”);
so.addVariable(”icon”, “images/weather/sunshine.png”);
That’s it. Six pretty simple steps to add transparency to your html page.
Here’s what it looks like
Download the source here:
transparent_png_example.zip
Here’s the alternative:
http://koivi.com/ie-png-transparency/
or
http://www.alistapart.com/stories/pngopacity/
I don’t know, that just seems like a whole lot more work to me…
September 28th, 2006
Here is a very useful extension that will set the library name to the instance name for a selected movieclip on the stage. I’ve wanted to do this for quite some time and while at the Flash Forward conference this past week Julian Dolce gave a session and presented the JSFL Code. I want to thank him for the great talk and releasing this code. I just packaged it up, so all the credit goes to him.
Download here:Â set-instance-name.zip
September 15th, 2006
I’m here in Austin on my second day at the Flashforward conference in Austin, TX. The keynote speaker this morning is Kevin Lynch with a few guests that are showing off some different new goodies. The first bit of news from Kevin is that the Flash player 9 will be releasd for linux soon.
The first guest was Garrett Nantz from Big Spaceship. Garrett showed off the Nike Air website on a linux machine running the flash player 9 version. Very cool site with some great green screen effects.
Justin Everett Church and Mike Downy gave some great sneak peaks into the next version of flash. Justin gave a quick demo of the some particle effects using the bitmapdata object in flash 8 and flash 9. The difference in speed was unbelievable using bitmap data caching. I am definitely going to look into this further.
Justin and Mike, for the first time, showed “Blaze” the next version of flash which had some amazing time saving upgrades. Probably the coolest was the file importer that will allow you to import Photoshop files while maintaining layers and text fidelity with a bunch of different options. You can even setup your bitmap compression settings which will be using the new photoshop compression engine. During the question and answer session Mike eluded to the possibility that Illustrator files would also have similar importablity.
The other really cool addition will be to directly copy frame animations into actionscript! This will allow designers to to create animations and developers to take those directly into a robust flexible application.
September 12th, 2006
I’ve recently been working with a modified AS 2.0 class I put together a few months ago that converts an xml file to an array. The problem is that it is not completely flexible with all valid xml files.
After using my class on about 15 different projects, I finally came across Xpath and the corresponding Actionscript version (XFactorStudio). Here is a really good tutorial on how to use the class - Accessing XML Data with XFactorStudio
I also found it very useful to include the CharacterEntity helper class by Jim Cheng, to deal with HTML in CDATA tags. XPATH functions return the ascii conversion for characters like <,>,’,”,etc…
June 20th, 2006