Posts
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G-Talk to me
bit101 at gmail dot com
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Sudoku for your phone
A while back I blogged about the number game, Sudoku.
Ted Patrick did not take my advice, clicked on the link, and became addicted. So much so that he wrote a Flash Lite 1.1 Sudoku game.
Read about it here:
https://www.ifbin.com/news/2005/08/flash-lite-11-sudoku-for-nokia-series.html
Thank God I don’t have a Flash enabled phone, or I’d never get anything done.
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BIT-101 Anniversary
Four years ago tomorrow, August 23, 2001, I did the first BIT-101 experiment. The site has taken me a long way since then. I was relatively new to ActionScript when I started it. Now I’ve got a great full-time Flash development job, more side work than I could possibly handle, contributed to something like eight or nine books, plus one book written cover-to-cover, won a Flash Film Festival award, spoken at Flash conferences in three countries. Life is good.
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PrimalScript 4.0 released.
Still my editor of choice, PrimalScript 4.0 was released today. Go download a free demo:
I’ve been testing this version for a couple of months now, and as much as I liked it before, I love it now. It’s quite solid and got some really cool new features.
Not to get into a “my editor is better than yours” but some quick comparisons.
It’s not FDT. FDT was written from the ground up as an AS project tool. Perfect for large Flash projects. PS handles something like 30 different languages. It has some pretty useful project features (I use them all the time), but it can also be used as a quick and dirty xml, php, text or whatever editor.
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My first Konfabulator Widget
Since Konfabulator went free, I’ve had it installed on two of my Windows machines and my Mac Mini (which I don’t use enough to justify an upgrade to Tiger). One thing I found really useful were the system info tools. Particularly on a laptop, it’s great to have a easy to see visual indicator of your battery and wifi strength. It’s also nice to have memory and CPU readouts too.
The problem was almost all of the system info widgets available just showed a single property. The “compact” series is nice, but I like to make these indicators topmost so they are always visible, and even 4-5 compact widgets generaly got in the way of something on the screen.
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It is done.
Yesterday morning at about 9:30 a.m., I typed the last words of Chapter 19 of ActionScript Animation: Making Things Move, hit Control-S, and clicked the little red “x”, closing Microsoft Word.
God did that feel good. Nine months of writing, re-writing, editing, coding, re-coding, editing code, re-writing, editing, writing…
But it is done. Still a few chapters left for final edits, but it is essentially over. Should be in the stores in October.
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More special characters
Just got reminded of a much earlier Window SWF I made. This one allows you to paste in any character and it will show you the unicode value for that character. Or, vice versa, enter a unicode number and see the character. Thought I had blogged this one earlier, but not, so here it is.
https://www.bit-101.com/specialchars/UniConvert.swf
Again, save to your WindowSWF directory, and restart Flash and open as an “Other Panel”.
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Flash Flickr Screensaver
I’ve been really into flickr lately. So the other day I made a flickr screensaver in Flash and Swf Studio 3 (Windows only). I know, there are probably ten hundred zillion other flickr screensavers out there, but if you absolutely can’t live without another one, here it is.
It doesn’t even use the flickr api. Just grabs the rss feed of the 10 most recent photos, parses out the urls and loads and displays them one each second. Then reloads the list, which is usually 10 new photos. Its amazing the sheer quantity of photos that are being uploaded to flickr 24/7. Pretty fun to watch actually.
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New Extension: Flash Special Characters Panel
Not sure why I never did this before. It was amazingly easy, and could have come in handy with a lot of the stuff I was doing last year. This is a Window SWF panel which allows you to easily enter special characters into Flash text fields.
To use, download the zip file (link below), unzip to the WindowSWF directory in your Flash Configuration directory. Restart Flash. Choose the menu item: Window/Other Panels/Special Characters.
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Beautiful Flash
Daniel Scheibel just shared the link to his final year project at the University of Applied Sciences in Augsburg, Germany.
Apparently some of the effects were inspired by some bit-101 experiments. Anyway, beautiful stuff!
Some pretty interesting technical stuff going on there too. Apparently syncs to local time and temperature to dynamically create some of the effects.
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