The new Alternativa3D platform needs to be seen to be believed.
This kind of stuff makes me love flash and at the same time never use it again. Excuse me while I go weep quietly to myself.
We at squidder have a total actionscript crush on Jack over at GreenSock. He continues his run of amazing classes his TransformMatrixProxy class, which performs some kind of strange voodoo magic using the transform.matrix property to let you tween skewX, skewY and more.
To get access to this awesome class, you’ll need to join
Club GreenSock. 50 scoots gets you these goods and more.
We’re late to the game as usual on this one, but if you’ve ever had a client who wanted MAXIMUM standards complacency and compatibility, its time you checked out Faust flash augmenting standard, evangelized by the future-loving folks over at space150.
Basically, its a really clever way of passing the content that you’re overwriting when you use SWFObject directly into the flash. Super clean and requires only one data call. Handy for things like navigation bars, which while fancy in flash, can also easily be viewed (and indexed) without flash. Hats off, space150, hats off.
A universal truth of flash is that stuff just needs to be on pixel to look good. Sometimes that’s a total pain in the butt. You may get handed a flash file by someone who doesn’t realize the importance of the rounded number, or you may just forget until its too late.
That’s where you can play it like the Fonz and use our
SnapToPixel flash extension. Written in JSFL (or jasofell, if you prefer), the command lives in “Commands -> SnapToPixel” and quite simply runs through all the keyframes on each layer and makes sure each object, text or movieclip is on pixel.
Keep in mind that this will not work on strait-up shapes because of the way jasofell treats them. There also may be a little hankiness if your object is rotated at all (at which point, snapping to pixel won’t matter anyway).
If there’s one thing that could be a ton cooler in AS3, its the audio capabilities. Yeah, we’ve all had fun making spectrum analyzers, but that was back in the hazy, drug riddled days of 2007. This is 2008 and 2008 demands better audio stability and features.
That’s where the “
Adobe, MAKE SOME NOISE” (sic) campaign comes in. Besides yelling at us, the project aims to end the spotty performance of the existing Sound packages, as well as push for some new, and nifty sounding (HA!), features for the next round of flash.
While I don’t like to post stuff that you can readily find at the FWA site (squidder awards?), I just caught myself playing with this
new Coke Zero game for over 10 minutes. Which is an eternity, really. Of course, you’re talking to the guy that seriously can’t wait until Line Rider is a DS game.
Overall, the experience does a magnificent job with video and emulating very well that Tarantino, Bobby Rodriguez style (my personal hero. Who else can direct Dusk ’till Dawn AND Spy Kids?). Hats off, too, for reasonable loading times.
One of the best things that has come out of my time with papervision has almost nothing to do with papervision itself. Indeed, it is the little frame rate bar that sits in the upper left hand corner of some of the example files. I use it for EVERYTHING. Just slap it on the root of the timeline and you’ve got a live frame rate reading, easy as pie cake (which is more delicious). I have no idea who wrote it originally, but if it was you, seriously, thank you. Geggy Tah style.
You can pull it down along side the papervision examples. I’ve also packaged it up separately and
added it to our google code page. Long term, we at squidder would like to expand on this and include memory usage as well.
Yeah, that’s right, I referenced that Geggy Tah song. Bet you hadn’t thought of that song in like, what, 10 years?
Bulk loader is an excellent open source package for managing multiple file loads in AS3. Supporting a wide variety of file types (xml, swfs, images, sounds and more) as well as multiple progress indications (files loaded / total files, weighted percentage and beyond), it’s hard to imagine writing a big, asset heavy project without it.
Crazy sounding, I know (I know!). And a few months ago, I would have told you that it was in fact crazy. But that was before I found baluga.net’s webthumb.
Almost offensively easy to use, Webthumb’s API works off a simple xml query that you can make from almost anywhere. It’s very easy to set up a lot of the finer details as well, including how the thumbnail is cropped, delay before taking the thumbnail and of course the size — indeed, you could just have a full view the site as opposed to a thumbnail.
The service is free to try out, with a 100 free credits a month (one request counts as one or more credits depending), though additional ones are quite reasonably priced. And while I probably wouldn’t recommend generating a thumbnail each time from the flash, there’s certainly no reason you couldn’t set up a cron job using flash or VRML or whatever the kids are into these days.
