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Psyked *

it’s easy once you know how.

Targeting multiple browsers with CSS… and some Javascript trickery.

Posted by James - 28/11/09 at 09:11:19 am

There’s a clever little javascript library that allows you to write CSS specifically for Chrome, the iPhone, IE 8, etc. all in a single file.  What it does is manipulate the HTML document client-side to add additional classes to the page, based on your browser type.  The end result is that your page gets additional selectors like .ie or .gecko added – and you can setup a single CSS file to target all of these browsers in one shot – no server side magic or conditional comments in the HTML.

You can find more information here ( http://snipplr.com/view/9340/css-browser-selector/ ) or download it from here (http://github.com/rafaelp/css_browser_selector ).

Link: Form Validation in Flex

Posted by James - 27/11/09 at 09:11:15 am

This sounds like a cool AS3/Flex library to try out for the next time you need to validate forms and data in Flex.  It’s an AS3 port of a Java library, supposedly geared towards unit testing, but also happens to be very good for form validation, as Joel Hooks points out in this article;

http://www.insideria.com/2009/11/validation-in-flex-with-hamcre.html

Link: What’s new in AIR 2.0 & FP10.1

Posted by James - 17/11/09 at 03:11:30 pm

Hot on the heels of AIR 2.0 and Flash Player 10.1 being released on Adobe Labs, Shigeru Nakagaki has done some analysis and produced some (very technical) lists of what’s new in them;

API differences between AIR 2.0 and AIR 1.5.2

API differences between FP 10.1 and FP 10.0

Embossed / Shadowed text in Flex

Posted by James - 09/11/09 at 09:11:38 am

If you get it right, drop shadow effects can really improve the appearance and clarity of text.  Mark sent me the starting code for this a little gem a while ago, but I’ve extended it to support Flexs’ CSS Styles support, and have been playing with different settings, which – with a bit of creativity – will give you anything from drop shadows to a bevelled appearance.

There are 4 classes we’ve created which are extensions to 4 basic Flex components – ShadowButton, ShadowLabel, ShadowText and ShadowText.  To each you can customise the shadows’ distance, angle, colour, alpha and blur amount.  Here’s some examples of the usage, and output of these classes;

Bevelled text:

ShadowLabel, ShadowButton, ShadowText, ShadowCheckBox
{
shadowColor: #ffffff;
} 

Drop shadowed text:

ShadowLabel, ShadowButton, ShadowText, ShadowCheckBox
{
shadowColor: #333333;
}

Continue reading Embossed / Shadowed text in Flex…

Cool ActionScript projects to try out, if you haven’t already…

Posted by James - 05/11/09 at 09:11:52 am

Hopefully I’ll get a chance to cover each of these in more detail shortly, but there’s a whole bunch of cool new Actionscript 3 projects that are floating around at the moment – here are some of my favourites that I’m trying to find enough time to explore in detail.  Each stands out from the crowd for being pretty awesome, and I’m hoping to find some killer way to combine them into my projects.

For Animations & Tweening:

GreenSock Tweening Platform [link]
The name actually encompasses five different varieties of animation libraries, and is awesome at scripting individual and timeline animations.  Not just that, but it comes packed with a load of animation options that you didn’t know you wanted, until you see them.  Like realistic motion blur.  That one’s cool.  Especially once you’ve tried making it yourself in the past…

Game development

Collision Detection Kit [link]
Much like the GreenSock stuff, just how good this is really has to be seen to be believed.  The basic Actionscript hit-test tools were never really that great.  Sure they worked, but if you wanted anything more than a Boolean response, it was no good at all.  The Collision Detection Kit gives you enough information to do proper physics – working out things like what, where and how hard things hit.  It works with any display object – vectors, bitmaps, even video.

Box2D [link]
Box2D.  Runs blindingly fast, precisely calculates physics and interactions.  It’s a true physics engine, rather than others (like Collision Detection Kit) which are just imitating physics.  A little hard to get into because it’s all written differently to every other Actionscript example I’ve ever seen (“You must unlearn what you have learnt”) but once you get over that hurdle, it’s just so… powerful.

Documentation for Box2D isn’t very new user friendly, but Emanuele Feronato has a fantastic series of blog posts on Box2D which will prove invaluable.