Psyked*

it’s easy once you know how.

Flash Player 10 (Astro) Prereleased!

Posted by James - 15/05/08 at 09:05:21 am

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

Flash Player 10 is out on prerelease. Why not go and give it a whirl?

Edit: Serge Jespers says it better than I.

FIVe3D - A different approach to 3D Flash

Posted by James - 15/05/08 at 08:05:20 am

FIVe3D is unlike other 3D engines ( such as Papervision or Alternitva3D ) in it’s approach.  We’re not talking shape primatives here, we’re talking extending the basic flash elements ( Sprites, Text, MovieClips ) to include Z-properties.  Looking at the demos, it’s not what you’d expect from ‘Flash 3D’, because we’re expecting another Papervision clone.  But no, the approach that Mathieu has taken when developing this is much different - and actually makes much more sense for a lot of situations.

Plus, it’s fun.  I’m a sucker for fun demos.

Continue reading FIVe3D - A different approach to 3D Flash…

Alternativa3D - More 3D goodness from the Flash Player

Posted by James - 03/05/08 at 09:05:42 am

3D Flash engines seem to be popping up everywhere at the moment.  [Although I wouldn't call that a bad thing] - Each one tends to take a different approach, do a different demo to distinguish themselves.  Take this for example, a very impressive looking offering from Alternativa3D;

Continue reading Alternativa3D - More 3D goodness from the Flash Player…

Flash on the Beach ‘08

Posted by James - 21/04/08 at 02:04:54 pm

Tickets for Flash on the Beach ‘08 are now on sale.  I’ve got mine (thanks, James!)  Go get yours?

Exploring the Flash CS3 FLVPlayback component

Posted by James - 04/04/08 at 11:04:09 pm

The FLVPlayback component that comes with Flash CS3 has been given a bit of a facelift, you know. (Well, the AS3 one has anyway - the older AS2 version is still the same old Flash 8 one).

Both versions have support for FullScreen, High-Def video and embedded Captioning, but what ‘excites’ me is that the ActionScript 3 version of the FLVPlayback component has the FullScreen and Captioning features built right into the default skin and moreover, the skin is far more flexible;

Nice, eh? You should be able to see that, in the ActionScript 3 version of the component, you are able to pick the background colour and opacity of the skin - no more messing around with custom skins for simple jobs - as well as the new component buttons in your Flash Video arsenal.
Continue reading Exploring the Flash CS3 FLVPlayback component…

Superscript and Subscript - with Actionscript*

Posted by James Cannings - 30/03/08 at 10:03:21 pm

*And a little bit of custom-font magic…

Although I do like writing lovely elegant code I’m also a big fan of ‘the cheap hack’! Here’s one I used last week to get round the age old problem of dynamic text boxes in Flash not supporting superscript and subscript. You need to do the following:
Continue reading Superscript and Subscript - with Actionscript*…

Custom character-set embedding in Flash

Posted by James Cannings - 25/03/08 at 11:03:11 pm

You know those lovely font embedding options?

Wouldn’t it be great if you could make your own character sets?

As great as the default options are (All, Uppercase, Lowercase, Numerals) the latter 3 combined don’t contain all of the visible characters - and the ‘All’ option embeds thousands of other useless characters. So how about this?
Continue reading Custom character-set embedding in Flash…