Posts
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SWFSheet Version 1.1 beta
It snowed here in Boston on Wednesday. Enough that I didn’t make it out of the house. Or at least not out of the driveway with shovel in hand. So, with a day off, I worked on adding features to SWFSheet. From yesterday’s post, I successfully implemented features 1-3. To recap and expand:
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PNG Sequence Export. Click on the new button “Export PNG Sequence” and a small window will pop up. Here you can enter the prefix to save the files with (“frame_” by default), and browse to a directory to store them.
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SWFSheet coming features
[EDIT: Just released a beta of SWFSheet 1.1 here: https://www.bit-101.com/2003/2948]
The response to SWFSheet has been overwhelming. I guess I wasn’t the only one who found such a tool useful. I’m going to release a new version with some updates soon. Here’s what I’m looking at adding:
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PNG Sequence Output. Instead of a single sprite sheet, output a series of PNG images into a directory of your choosing. You can then use these directly or use them with a more advanced sprite sheet tool to make a sprite sheet. This feature is actually complete already.
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SWFSheet – create sprite sheets from SWFs
[EDIT: Just released a beta of SWFSheet 1.1 here: https://www.bit-101.com/2003/2948]
[EDIT: Version 1.1 final released: https://www.bit-101.com/2003/2977]SWFSheet is a program I created in most of a day back in late December. I finally polished it up this week and it’s now ready for release. The idea is to take an animation created in Flash, and generate a sprite sheet from it. A sprite sheet, for those of you who may not be familiar, is a single large bitmap containing several frames of an animation, usually layed out in a grid. These can be loaded in very efficiently by games, and each frame shown to recreate the animation.
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Hello DreamHost
As of now, this blog, as well as Art From Code, MinimalComps, Wicked Pissah Games, and my personal site (and a few sites run by my wife), are now hosted on DreamHost. Previously, I’d been using Media Temple since 2006, but it was time for a switch.
I don’t want to totally tear apart my former host, but I will explain the reasons why I chose to switch. I had signed up for the Grid Server on MT, paying $170 per year, or about $14.17 per month, though it’s currently advertised as $20 per month. For that, you get 100 GB storage, 1 TB transfer per month, 100 domains, 1000 email addresses. It sounds like that should be enough to handle just about anything I could throw at it. And per actual stats, I had at the peak, less than a dozen domains, most of which had little or no traffic, and a couple of email addresses, only one of which was really used. I used an average of 5 GB storage, and 60 GB bandwidth, with a peak month of 150 GB bandwidth (my iPad vs Kindle display post). So for all stats, I was way, WAY below any limits. Really just a small fraction of the limits. And that pretty much worked up until the beginning of 2010.
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Good bye 2010
As usual, it’s time to make my year end post. I’ll keep it relatively brief.
A few changes this year. This spring, I got kind of fed up with Apple, their control-happy policies, and the general direction they are heading. After 3 years of being 100% Mac, I switched back to Windows. It is an action that I not only do not regret the tiniest bit, but as Apple continues to evolve in the same direction, I’m happier than ever that I switched when I did. This is not to say that I’ve abandoned all iOS development and have thrown away my Mac. I still own two Apple computers. Both are plugged in and booted up and ready for action at all time. I have an iPhone, and iPad, an iPod Touch and a 5G iPod. They aren’t going anywhere. But the machine I open up in the morning and use all day long is my Sony Vaio, and I’m very happy with it. I’m not shoving it down your throat. If you’re happy with Apple, far be it from me to try to change your mind. I’m OK, you’re OK, right?
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Using MinimalComps’ Scrollbar
The scrollbar component in minimalcomps was never really meant to be used as a standalone component. This is not to say that it can’t be, it’s just that the interface doesn’t really have the same simplicity and ease of use as the other components. However, a few people have asked about it, so here’s an example of how to use it.
First we’ll need something to scroll. We’ll create a sprite with a bunch of random lines and give it a scrollrect so that it has more content than it can show.
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PaceCalc for Windows Phone 7
As many of you know, I’ve been running for the last year and few months, and completed a few races here and there. One of the first things you start to focus on when you sign up for your first race is your pace and predicted finish time. It’s a simple calculation of pace = time / distance. You might be thinking, “wait, speed is distance / time”, but runners usually measure pace in minutes per mile or kilometer, rather than kilometers or miles per hour. So if you know the length of your race and how fast you can run, you can predict when you’ll come in. Or if you have a goal for when you want to come in, you can calculate how fast you need run to meet that goal. Last, and probably least, if you know how fast you’ll be going and how long you’ll be running, you can predict how far you will go.
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Falling Balls for Windows Phone 7 is Live!
When I decided to learn Windows Phone 7 programming, deciding what to code up was a no-brainer. Falling Balls! I got most of the game done before I had a device. Then got a loaner from Microsoft and shortly thereafter got my own Samsung Focus. I love the phone. Really grows on you. Anyway, with a device, I was able to wrap up the accelerometer code and tweak the game play and such and get the thing ready to go. It took a bit of study to find out all the stuff you need for submission – name, description, keywords, various sized icons, screenshots, etc. But finally got it all wrapped up and pushed the button on Sunday night.
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Structure Synth 1.5.0 Released
This past year I gave my “Programming Art” talk at five different conferences: Multi-Mania Belgium, FlashBelt, and FiTC in Toronto, San Francisco and Edmonton. I think the two things that stood out the most for people were Context Free Art and Structure Synth. If you haven’t checked into these two tools, you owe it to yourself to try them out. Neither one is something you’re going to base your future career on, but both will change the way you think about programming and creating graphics.
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What is Flash?
This weekend I was at FITC Edmonton, where I presented my Programming Art session for the last time. I’ll be working on something new for next year. It was a fun conference. Very relaxed, and for the first time ever, I actually attended every single session in the entire conference.
In addition to my own session, I was part of a discussion panel entitled “Staying Lithe in a Changing Rich Media Climate” along with Skye Boyes, Mike Chambers, Grant Skinner, and moderated by Owen Brierley. The description of the panel was:
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