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.
Jon: April 2008 Archives
To get access to this awesome class, you'll need to join Club GreenSock. 50 scoots gets you these goods and more.
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.
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).
Originally written a year ago, we've updated to work correctly with CS3. You can check it out at our google code page. And, if you're so curious, you can see the outrageously simple source code in our squidder svn.
We at squidder love all manner of technology, not just flash. Like wii remotes. And Johnny Lee. And you should too. If you haven't seen this stuff, be sure to check out the video above.
It'll be the coolest thing you'll see today. More Johnny Lee's wizardry can be seen at his site.
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.
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?
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.
By the way, if you haven't seen the SEO rap, you owe (OWE) it to yourself to check out all of m0serious' work. Make it happen.
Sometimes all you want to do is wait a few seconds to make a call to a given function, particularly when you're doing some sequenced animation. While this is certainly easier now that we've got the Timer instead of setInterval (*shudder*), it's still not a one-liner, especially once you take garbage collection into account.
That's where Delayer comes in.
- import com.squidder.delayer.Delayer;
- new Delayer( _testfunction , 3000 , "hello there" , 33 );
- function _testfunction( s:String , n:Number ) : void {
- trace( s + " , " + n );
- }
Simple enough! The only required variables are the function and the delay (in milliseconds). From there, you can pass through as many arguments you like, if any. There's also a cancel function, in case you're into that kind of thing.
Go grab it up over at our fancy Google Code project page.
TweenMax is the band new tween class, from the outrageously brilliant mind of Jack Doyle. It is the wonderful love child of TweenLite and TweenFilterLite and has some really excellent features, not least of which is the inclusion of bezier points, so we can finally and easily do some tweens on a curve.
Amazingly, Jack managed to pack all of this functionality in 8k (vs 3k for TweenLite), so serious hats off to him - I can certainly say we'll be using this from now on. Be sure to check out his comparison chart for full deets.
There are a slew of good options out there: Tweener, TweenLite, TweenMax, Go, and more, all with similar feature sets. So which one's the best?
We here at squidder have this debate often, with some devs who prefer Tweener and others who rely on TweenLite. Fortunately, there are others who have done the heavy lifting for us to give a numbers to numbers face-off.
My favorite point of comparison is the speed tester over at GreenSock. Although it was created by the author of TweenLite (so you could cry foul, I suppose, though it doesn't seem like there's any reason to), it seems to be the easiest way to quickly compare tweens in a real world situation.
For those of you interested in running your own test, you can roll over to the TweenBencher. Again, this is a tool created by one of the makers of a tween class (Go), but read that as you will. Regardless, the tool certainly puts out some good hard numbers.
Personally, I don't think you can go wrong with TweenLite TweenMax, but one thing is for certain: they're all better than the built-in tween classes.
CDN/Streaming services, like Akamai Stream OS and Limelight, are great. And if you're going to have a ton of traffic, streaming live events and more, they are indispensable. But what if you have a small project? Or you're just looking to experiment?
Chances are, if you have a small need, Akamai will just point you to one of their partners that they basically resell bandwidth to. There are many of these partners and, in my experience, probably the best thing is to just call Akamai and ask they direct you to a partner that fits your needs.
But there's a big difference when you're calling from a big agency and when you're calling as a freelancer with a small client.
I've experienced both and will say that the latter can often be disheartening. But there are alternatives, which is where Influxis comes in. Don't let the 1992 green on black design fool you. Starting as low as 10 bucks a month, they are perfect if you're just looking to get to know flash media server. At the same time, I've also used them for much larger scale projects (30k+ server connects in 5 days) and they performed wonderfully.
When big CDNs are overkill, remember that there are reasonable alternatives. I'm sure there are hundreds of other companies like Influxis and if you've had a good experience with one, definitely let us know.
The April 2008 security update for the flash plug-in is coming. And it looks mean, especially if you do a lot of communication between flash and the browser in the form of javascript. While it shouldn't effect those of you already using allowScriptAccess="always", its still worth checking against any flash applications you have out in the wild.
More information, strait from the horse's mouth.
Face it. Documentation is a total pain. Fortunately, generating it doesn't have to be. And while projects like NaturalDocs make things a little easier (and cleaner) to work with, there's nothing quite like a good ol' Adobe style, frame loving, totally unorganized doc folder.
Seriously, though. Commenting for ASDocs is extremely easy and ultimately a great way to go if there's even the slightest possibility that someone else might look at your code. Plus, it's standard and has a lot of great benefits, like showing up in introspection for those of you developing in FDT 3. And, if you are developing flash/AS3 in Eclipse, it's super easy to set up documentation generation at the click of a button. Screenshots and more after the jump.
Continue reading ASDocs and Eclipse: BFF.
That's where MoteDaemon, an awesome project out of Berlin, comes in. Ultimately, the plan is to integrate the tiny server application with the wiiflash.org library, but it updates have been spotty at best. To fill the gap in the interim, however, we have developed an as3 library based on Sebastian's javascript / as1/2 examples using the XMLSockets.
A very early version is available here and while we may not grow this library much beyond its current state -- hopefully we'll find a way to get into the wii flash library with a mac -- you may find it handy (or at least fun).
