So we here at squidder have been playing around with the FLARToolKit a lot recently. Pretty amazing stuff really. And while fooling around with it, something (perhaps obvious) occurred to us: We love flash. And we also love t-shirts. And Papervision. And Twitter.
And, suddenly, we had a way to combine them all together.
Below is an early technical demo, in which a barcode, containing a twitter username, is embedded within our FLAR pattern. This is important because you don’t need to create a new pattern for each username. Instead, the flash reads the person’s username (up to 8 characters, encoded in 6 bit chunks) and then pulls that person’s latest post from twitter.
The source code is a mess, but we’ll be posting some more how-to details soon. In the meantime, enjoy the video demo below!
Update: Fixed a minor bug when dealing with transparent sources.
Everyone loves pixel bender and everyone loves those apple-like reflections. So why not combine them? That’s why we’ve gone ahead and created a very simple pixel bender filter for creating just this effect, even on video (and it looks especially good on video).
Whew! It’s been a busy few months for your friends over at squidder. But to make up for the fact that we have been totally delinquent bloggers, we bring you Bumblebee.
What is Bumblebee, you ask? It’s a program born out of many many projects where the client has sent us excel documents and we’ve had to either move it to xml by hand or try to wrap our heads around the excel xml mapping scheme (spoiler: it sucks).
So we went ahead and wrote our own mapping program that uses simple templates to map values from an excel xml file to your own xml file.
We’ve love to hear if it helped you at out or if you have any suggestions, bugs or feature requests for future versions. Hit us up at bumblebee at squidder dawt com.
Set up your sentry turrets, because google is coming for your flash content. Sure, it’ll look fine after the initial pass. But just let it gestate a few days and the innards of your flash movie will be splayed all over the place.
It really remains to be seen how this new development from The Company Google will affect us flash developers. In some ways, it could be bad — imagine an instance where only some of the text is embedded but not necessary representational. Yeah, yeah, it’ll index data calls as well, but still, you should probably stick to some good ol’ SEO best practices for now… On the other hand, it probably spells relief for clients, which can only mean more work for flash devs everywhere… and disaster for Earth.
We at squidder wanted to highlight an oldie, but goodie, package, from our heros over at Big Spaceship labs. Out does just about everything you might want a logging tool to do, including the ability to exclude certain classes from speaking out at will.
Strength & honor, Big Spaceship. Strength & honor.
The mad genius over at PixelBreaker has come up with a really clever javascript/flash hybrid implementation of the mouse wheel for mac. And to top it all off, integration with SWFObject is already done. Seriously, SWFMacMouseWheel, ring is in the mail.
Here’s a cool one: Matthew Tretter over at ex animo has come up with a particularly clever way of using JSFL to avoid redundant actionscript bytes when building complex applications by excluding actionscript classes (which you could easily do in AS2, but not so easily in AS3). Well played, jasofel, well played.
We here at squidder have a love/hate relationship with scrollbars. Partly because, while seemingly simple, they can overly complicated very quickly.
So when we wrote our latest scrollbar class, we decided to try out scrollRect. Seemed pretty strait-forward – just pass in a rectangle and it takes care of all the masking, offset and everything. Way more efficient than setting a mask and then moving that about… or so we thought. (cue dramatic crescendo)
A lot of people really haven’t figured out the best use for AIR apps yet, and we at squidder are no different. Most of time, an online app will let you get away with most everything that you want to do. Personally, I think the infatuation with AIR comes from a desire for flash developers to feel more like ‘real’ developers (zing!).
No, seriously. One of the best ways to see what to do (and what not to do) is to just take a look at what other people are doing. And there may be no better place to do that than at freshairapps.com. Regular expression checker anyone?
We at squidder often talk about the best way to bring SEO and accessibility to our flash work. And in many ways, the work is simple when you add in fancy tools like SWFObject — just spit out the content you want to appear to a search engine in the div that gets overwritten!
But what if you’ve got an extremely complex site, with many sections, pages and drill downs that you want to make accessible? One option is to simply spit out all the content, no matter how long, into that same div. Yes, that will get indexed by search engines, but not only does it make the page you’re loading very large, it also doesn’t link users directly to the content they searched for.
That’s where SWFAddress and mod_rewrite come in. Full deets after the jump.
