Posts
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Macromedia Overload
Flash 8 would be enough to keep me busy for the next 6 months. Now we have Flash 8.5 player, Zorn, Flex 2, AS3, not to mention everything I’ve been meaning to check out on the land of OSFlash.
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All cool stuff, but my head and my schedule can’t take much more. -
Design a Watch
Found a cool link to a Flash application that lets you design your own custom watch, then buy it.
Nothing technically groundbreaking, but if you are into watches, this is a very nice application. I’m actually tempted to buy the one I created! And how cool would it be if someone said, “Nice watch, where’d you get it?” and you answered, “Oh, this? I designed it.” Haha!
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Be careful when using MovieClip properties to store values
I’ve been working on some physics based modeling using Verlet integration (example in the BIT-101 labs). I started a very simple system of just two connected particles with a “stick” between them and initialized them with opposite y velocities. (Note, if you don’t know what I’m talking about in the first few paragraphs here, jump down to paragraph six or so. That’s where the important stuff is!)
Anyway, the result of this system should have been a spinning stick. But no matter what I did, the thing kept drifting off to the left, and even had a tendancy to drift upwards if no gravity was applied.
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Speaking of Sample Chapters…
I just noticed that Sas Jacobs‘ book, Foundation XML for Flash has now shipped, and has a free sample chapter on line. Looks like a pretty useful one, especially if you are just starting out in using XML with Flash.
Of course, this is another book that you should go out and actually buy
Read more..., if only for the fact that I wrote the foreword!
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Making Things Move – Sample Chapter On Line!
I was just browsing the publisher’s page for Foundation ActionScript Animation: Making Things Move to find out when it might be published, and noticed there was a sample chapter link there. And when I clicked on it, I saw there was a sample chapter there. Nobody told me!
The chapter is Chapter 14 on Inverse Kinematics. A popular subject, no doubt. I think a lot of the material there is dependent on knowing stuff from earlier chapters (so you have to buy the book, of course!) but still some pretty neat things in there.
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UI Patterns and Techniques
My boss sent this link around a couple of weeks ago. Finally got around to checking it. With everyone so focused on programming design patterns, here’s are some for the interface designers out there. I haven’t read them all but it looks like pretty solid advice in general.
https://time-tripper.com/uipatterns/
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It's Done! (again)
I said it before, but now, I’m serious. Foundation ActionScript: Making Things Move, is complete.
I finished writing a while back, and spent the last few weeks editing, fixing up some graphics, etc. The last step is to review the PDFs which go to the printer. Got through all the chapter PDFs and I just looked at the PDF for the front matter and gave it my OK. There is nothing more I have to do on it. It goes to China to be printed now, and should hit the stores in a few weeks.
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Sparkle is here…
https://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/interactive_designer/default.aspx
Are we scared yet?
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To those who are "disappointed" with Flash 8
I’ve seen a few posts here and there.
First of all, how can you be disappointed with something after less than a day using it? I know you haven’t scratched the surface yet. It looks like the same old Flash, but there is a lot under the hood that you can’t see. You need to dig around for a while.
OK, you are disappointed because you were really hoping for “feature X”, when feature X was never mentioned as part of Flash 8, and in some cases was specifically said that feature X was NOT going to be part of Flash 8.
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Cool Clock Utility
One of the signs of a really great system utility is when you forget it’s even there. I’ve had TClock Light installed forever and had totally forgotten about it until a co-worker asked me how I got my system tray clock to look like that.
TClock Light is just a replacement for the existing clock that sits down in your Windows XP system tray. It basically gives you complete control over how your clock looks – font, color, size, what info to display, how to format it. The existing clock is pretty inflexible. It will show you whatever info it decides it has room, in whatever format, font and color it decides on. It always bugged me that XP usually decides there’s no room for the date, and you have to roll over it to see what day it is. TClock lets you show whatever info you want, however you want to see it. Again, it’s cool because it does what it’s supposed to do, and doesn’t intrude in your life again. I forgot all about it until someone looked at it and said, hey that’s cool!
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