InitMonitor v.0.3: Not Just Another PureMVC Initialization Manager [AS3] · 3 hours ago by Pickle
The initial release of InitMonitor was described as a minimalist initialization manager. After using it for a little while I decided I wanted something more robust and full featured. So instead of reinventing the wheel I thought to use the official PureMVC StartupManager and bundled Asset Loader. After working for a while on converting an existing project to this paradigm I came to the realization that these were not the tools for the job.
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MinimalRemoting: Simple Remoting Class without the Bells and Whistles [AS3] · 1 day ago by Pickle
Mostly based on two other public projects, this class distills AMF remoting in AS3 down to a class that extends EventDispatcher. Code was ripped from Josh Strike’s remoting package and also from ProDevTips.
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Papervision3D: Camera Orbiting Done 3 Ways - AutoOrbit [AS3] · 11 days ago by Pickle
In an attempt to come up with the perfect camera orbit, I’ve created these three classes. The goal was for them to be easy to use, add minimal overhead, and provide some useful options…
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New AFW/PV3D Microsite Launched · 13 days ago by Pickle
Whipped this up in about a week. Although it is a microsite, it has a full AS3 PureMVC + AFW Template implementation. If you’ve read about the AFW Template you know this means a content-managed, search-engine optimized, swirly whirly SWFAddress-ified, etc. website.
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Off-Topic: The Real Financial Crisis · 15 days ago by Pickle
I’m Blogging about this because the events of 2008 will effect the rest of our lives in more ways than almost any year I have been alive (except maybe 2001). The decisions of our world leaders during the current drama will reverberate for the next century. My favorite financial blogger has composed a two-part series, that while funny is soberingly depressing. If you haven’t read Mish’s Blog let me just say up front that this it not a partisan issue. I do not consider his opinions to be political rhetoric. Surely, there are people out there who will use this type of thing to stroke their own political ego— to fluff up their talking points. Please stop all that nonsense, this has nothing to do with conservative or liberal, democrat or republican.
Please Read:
Fiscal Insanity Virus Rapidly Spreading The Globe – Part 1
Fiscal Insanity Virus Rapidly Spreading The Globe – Part 2
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Real Snow in Papervision3D [AS3] · 23 days ago by Pickle
I like this one better. It’s much faster without the physics stuff so I added more flakes.
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Silly Snow Wow+Papervision3D [AS3] · 25 days ago by Pickle
It’s the holiday season.
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Real-Time Lip sync in Flash · 55 days ago by Pickle
On the left is lip-syncing based on pre-processed (voice recognition) phoneme mapping. On the right is real-time lip syncing utilizing the AS3 function computeSpectrum. Both use almost the same visual phoneme models, except the real-time version on the right currently uses 1 less phoneme.
The pre-processed version on the left uses a text-based voice recognition algorithm, which can theoretically be extremely accurate, but it does not produce perfectly aligned results. The results could also be maligned because they are not being rendered with the correct timing. Either way, it is a comparison of two far from perfect implementations of lipsyncing.
Which one do you like better?
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getNestedBounds: A getBounds Replacement for Complex Display Objects [AS3] · 89 days ago by Pickle
Is the built-in getBounds function not quite living up to your needs? When calculating bounds on objects without children, getBounds works exactly as you might expect. However, once child objects are added to the mix the results you get may seem unexpected and loose. The solution is to recursively calculate bounds on all the child objects. I give you getNestedBounds() which can be used as a replacement for any getBounds() statement
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InitMonitor: Yet Another PureMVC Initialization Manager [AS3] · 89 days ago by Pickle
InitMonitor is an initialization manager designed for simplicity and flexibility. Admittedly, overall not as full featured as some other solutions out there. However, unlike most others, this manager is intended to be used (and reused) at any stage in your application, not just at startup. InitMonitor was designed in conjunction with my PureMVC SWFAddress implementation and works well in a situation where application start-up can mean many different things depending on the entry point URL.
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Seamlessly Combining 2D and 3D in Flash with Planes, Part 2 [AS3] · 117 days ago by Pickle
Part 1 of this article made the assumption that there is a camera pointed at the origin that doesn’t move. With this assumption in mind, we are able to greatly simplify the mathematical calculations necessary to combine 2D and 3D elements in Flash. With this knowledge, you can take a 2D element and render that in 3D space, animate it somehow, and then suck it back into 2D space. In applying this concept to more complicated situations where the camera is allowed to move, our assumptions still hold true. Here’s how: imagine a plane that is always situated 1000 units in front of the camera. No matter how you move the camera around, this plane is always parallel to the camera lens, and perpendicular to the direction of the camera.
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Tuturial: Embedding Fonts in Flash CS3 the Good Way · 122 days ago by Pickle
This is an old topic, but it needs to be said. Embedding fonts in CS3 is very easy, but the documentation on this topic is lacking. Most people embed their fonts by creating a Font in the Library. Unfortunately, this method can lead to immense file sizes especially when you are embedding fonts with many different characters (like Chinese fonts). You can shave 100’s or 1000’s of kilobytes off by embedding only the characters your flash app actually needs.
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New AS3 Site Now Live · 140 days ago by Pickle
My upgraded website has gone live. The previous AS2 version of this website was the basis for the AS2 version of the AFW Template. This new version will be the basis for the AS3 version. The Textpattern back-end system made the switch instantaneous. Hopefully I’ll have more time to publish articles now that this site has launched.
The New Hookah Cafe Website: http://www.hookah-cafe.com
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Publish And Exclude: Flash CS3 Plugin for Optimizing File Size · 186 days ago by Pickle
Thank Matthew Tretter for hacking into existence the AS2 feature mysteriously missing from AS3. In AS2, class files could be excluded from compilation with an xml file filename_exclude.xml which listed classes to be excluded from filename.swf. I’ve modified and packaged his JSFL script into an MXP file for quick and easy installation.
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Seamlessly Combining 2D and 3D in Flash with Planes, Part 1 [AS3] · 198 days ago by Pickle
Integrating Papervision3D in a useful way can be tricky. Suppose you’ve created some useful website widget. When the user clicks the settings button, the widget does a 3D-flip and shows the settings controls on the other side. To achieve this in AS3 and Papervision3D, temporarily transfer both display components into a plane, using MovieMaterial. Hide the component, spin the plane by tweening rotationY (or rotationX), and when the tween is complete make the settings component visible.
In the case where you’re transferring only one display component to one Papervision3D viewport, it’s pretty simple to implement this kind of functionality. It starts to get tricky when you want to transfer multiple display components to one viewport and have those components interact in some way with a 3D world.
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How-To: Rockstar Flash Programming [AS3] · 220 days ago by Pickle
Rockstar Flash programming is about making cool stuff with the least amount of work. Rockstars need time for tequila shots, uncontrollable fornication, and role playing games. They don’t have time to code their own tweening solutions, or 3d libraries. The main focus of this article is to recommend a set of tools, frameworks, and utility libraries that work really well and will save you time if you’re not using them already. I’ll also cover how to approach loading assets into Flash (an unglamorous topic that does not receive nearly enough attention) to make your site as fast as possible.
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ATXI: AMFPHP + Textpattern Integration · 248 days ago by Pickle
Use this AMFPHP service plugin to integrate the Textpattern database with AMFPHP to allow fast data exchange with Flash.
This is essentially a faster alternative to the afw_getarticle Textpattern plugin.Edit: My original thought was that remoting would replace the afw_getarticle Textpattern plugin, however afw_getarticle still provides functionality which lets the developer leverage the Textpattern platform for XML generation in a way that ATXI cannot emulate (yet).
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PureMVC+SWFAddress Template: Integrating SWFAddress with PureMVC [AS3] · 251 days ago by Pickle
So I’ve been trying to chart the best course as I begin to learn about AS3. After some meandering, I’ve decided that I need to use the PureMVC Framework for AS3. So far I like PureMVC mainly because it encourages consistency. In reality, PureMVC is not a very big chunk of code. It’s pretty bare-bones. However, the design philosophy behind the framework is probably as important as the framework itself.
Googling led me to the blog of Ashier de Leon who recently did a wonderful job of integrating SWFAddress and PureMVC. I’ve repackaged Ashier’s work and modified the Class structure after reading this PureMVC forum post. A new class SWFAddressProxy treats SWFAddress as a part of the data model (as opposed to a view component) and lets the programmer use Notifications to interact with the address state…
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How CASA for AS2 is similar to AS3 · 253 days ago by Pickle
I’m finally migrating to AS3 and so far it’s been a breeze after working with the CASA Framework for AS2. AS3 seems to implore you to program in an Object Oriented (OO) manner. While AS2 already supports the use of classes, I never really used them much until CASA encouraged me to use classes along with OO programming techniques…
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afw_events Screenshots · 258 days ago by Pickle
Today I received a request for some screenshots of afw_events. Apparently it’s been tricky for some people to install and they want to see if it’s worth the trouble. So here goes…
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afw_events: Textpattern Plugin · 272 days ago by Pickle
Use this plugin to manage article-based events. Edit events via an YUI AJAX-Powered interface to quickly insert and edit events.
This plugin does not use an additional database to store any info.
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afw_getarticle: Textpattern Plugin · 273 days ago by Pickle
This tag works very similarly to article_custom, except that the section and url_title of the article(s) displayed are determined by either POST or GET variables in the URL. Also, the default limit is 1.
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AllFlashWebsite Template, CASA Release [AS2] · 278 days ago by Pickle
Based on the original AFW Template. This version uses CASA to accomplish the same thing, only better….
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Adding Bam! to AFW Template [AS2] · 321 days ago by Pickle
On the Textpattern side of things, the template is pretty solid. Since most of the code is from well-developed OS projects, the functionality is there. And for my part, I added the…
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The AllFlashWebsite Template [AS2] · 355 days ago by Pickle
This template attempts to be a complete solution you can use for any Flash website that needs features going beyond the trivial Flash animation doohickey. Don’t judge the template by the unattractiveness of the demo (it’s pretty ugly). It isn’t meant to offer you any visual styling help, whatsoever. That’s all up to you. Hopefully you’re a Flash developer who creates original, interactive sites that actually use Flash to push the boundaries of the browser beyond HTML. This template allows you the flexibility to create whatever kind of site you want, but offers a framework which will help you work more efficiently and create a site that is highly compatible in many different ways. Some of the benefits include cross-browser compatibility, CMS, effortless SEO, mixing flash and non-flash content, XML in Flash, RSS in Flash, Printing from Flash…
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Adding a Print Button to a Flash Webpage [AS2] · 362 days ago by Pickle
Flash doesn’t provide a good, built-in way to print a web page. But then again, it doesn’t need to. By building on top of the content-managed XML model, adding a print button requires very little work.
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Content in Flash and Textpattern: Bridging the Gap with XML [AS2] · 369 days ago by Pickle
You could probably dream up numerous ways to use an RSS feed in your Flash Movie. However, there might come a time when you want more control over the generated content. This is where the ability to generate custom XML will come in handy.
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XML in Flash is Easy because RSS Feeds are Free [AS2] · 373 days ago by Pickle
In the previous article we inserted a flash website into the TextPattern CMS, but failed to integrate the content so that there would be no duplication. Instead, the CMS was used to re-publish content from our flash movie for search-bot and non-flash-browser compatibility. Doing it this way doesn’t really make sense. In fact, a compelling reason to use a CMS is to eliminate the need to duplicate content. Our new approach should be simple: put all content in the CMS, and have the CMS automatically output two versions: XML for Flash, HTML for everyone else.
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Basic Structure of a Flash Website [AS2] · 375 days ago by Pickle
One of the most important considerations when creating a Flash Website is how to properly structure the site. The AllFlashWebsite.com (AFW) technique combines several open-source and freely available tools for a solution that is easy to maintain, and simple. To make it work, these are the tools we need: SWFObject, SWFAddress, and TextPattern. SWFObject uses JavaScript to embed your Flash movie into the web page, and is preferred over the automatically generated HTML by Flash gurus everywhere. SWFAddress enables deep linking which allows your visitors to bookmark your flash website, or use the back/forward buttons while browsing. SWFAddress is also essential if you want to achieve effective search engine optimization (SEO). Lastly, Textpattern is an open-source content management system (CMS), written in PHP. Textpattern is a good choice because of it’s simplicity and ease of customization, however the AFW technique is possible with almost any CMS you would like to use.
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