Hey people, I’ve been published again in Web Designer Magazine Issue 159. In this tutorial, I walk you through how to make a MP3 player with a sound visualizer. Its a pretty short and straight to the point tutorial. Hopefully everyone will be able to follow along and make some cool mp3 players. If there are any concerns or questions, post it here on the blog and I’ll get back to you ASAP.
Go pick up your copy and leave some feed back. Check out a preview here
Finding a good Flash Blog as a developer is sometimes hard to find. Here are a couple that I keep stashed in my RSS Reader.
This is an excellent blog of experiments and cool effects that you can do in Flash. Some of the popular posts on this blog include an ASCII Art Generator that turns images AND videos into ASCII characters.
Another great experimental blog that is heavily concentrated on 3d and particles.
A very informative blog and home to the FlashCamo Decal framework. I call The Flash Art of War a developer’s view in laymen terms. Make sure if you are in the NYC area to check out NYC Flash Developers Happy Hour.
Stay on top of everything Flash from Platform Evangelist Lee Brimelow. Make sure to check out gotoAndLearn and browse through the excellent screencasts.
Great resource for learning what you can do with ByteArrays and all sorts of techniques that are hard to find around the web.
Excellent resource about memory and cpu management involving the Flash Player. Also home to the retired but popular gTween Tweening Engine.
Great resource for programing in Actionscript 3.0. This blog usually has tons of information on open source API’s and popular topics like Augmented Reality, Flash Player 10 3D and much more
An interview I did with Scott over @FlashDen just released today. It’s a pretty good interview and I enjoyed answering all the questions. The interview is mainly about the NYC Flash Developers Happy Hour meetup I often attend run by Jesse Freeman. Make sure to add him on twitter @TheFlashBum. It’s a Flash User group here in the big Apple that runs a meeting every once or twice a month. If you happen to be in the New York City area, please stop by and have a good time.
I rarely re post a blog that has already been posted, but in this case I think I will. I’m sure everyone already knows about the student program to get a free copy of Flex. If you are a student you can just submit your student I.D and get a free serial. For those who don’t know. Check out this link. Now according to Mr. Lee Brimelow, there is a second program tht allows developers to get a free copy if they are out of work. HOW COOL!!, Adobe is thinking about the little guys =D.
My favorite Tweening engine is uniting with another popular engine, gTween. Just checked my email to hear the fascinating news. Jack Greensock and Grant Skinner, both renowned in the Flash community have decided to put there heads together and make a Powerhouse Tweening engine which should be better than both. I myself am looking forward to this union. I never had the chance to use gTween alone because I was so hooked on TweenLite, but I know the newest version borrowed some of gTweens features such as shortRotation. There is also a beta version out that can be found on Jack’s site.
Here is an excerpt from Jack’s announcing post.
Grant Skinner is one of the most well-respected Flash developers in the world. His inspiring work and generous contributions to the Flash community have earned him a stellar reputation and countless fans. So it is with great excitement that I announce our collaboration on the upcoming release of TweenLite and TweenMax. Grant’s recent Beta offerings of his gTween engine showed great promise and as we talked, it became obvious that we have similar objectives. We figured it made a lot of sense to put our heads together and build on TweenLite and TweenMax, creating a unified platform that’s better, faster, and more flexible than ever. Grant has a proven track record of looking for ways to benefit the overall Flash community, and this is just one more example. It is truly an honor to have his valuable input.
Woot!!!, just a really small post. You are reading this post from the new AS3 Tutor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. I actually got the good news a couple days ago, but I would like to share it with the world =D.
In addition, if anyone needs any help with Actionscript 3.0 or needs a private tutor, don’t hesitate to drop me an email. In the next coming days I have some interesting things to post about ranging from new FlashDen products to new published articles. So be on the lookout for those, or you know what is even better?? Just subscribe and I’ll let you know. =D Happy Flashing people.
This weekend my good friend Peter Panton asked my for some help setting up some communication between Javascript and Actionscript. He wanted to be able to get the scroll value of the HTML page and use it in Flash. To be honest, I never did any kind of communication between the two and had no idea where to start. I did some research and came across the ExternalInterface Class.
It took me a while to get how exactly the class worked, but once I got a handle on it, setting up the relation was easy. At first I set up a small test just to see if I can pass information back and forth. Basically is just passes string from the HTML page to Flash and vice versa. You can check it out at ExternalInterface Test 1. All the code will be at the bottom.
Once I jumped for joy with the first example, I got the scroll example to work here. The Javascript just sends the value of the scrollTop to the Flash text field. Since I’m on the Mac, Im not too sure if this works in IE, but it works just fine in FireFox and Safari. The example isn’t rocket science but I figure I’d share it anyway. I’ll even share the example files for you to play with.
Have Fun
import flash.external.ExternalInterface;
sendBut.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, toJS);
if(ExternalInterface.available)
{
try
{
ExternalInterface.addCallback("sendToFlash", fromJS);
}
catch(e:Error)
{
}
}
function fromJS($value:String):void
{
oText.text = $value;
}
function toJS(e:MouseEvent):void
{
if(ExternalInterface.available)
{
ExternalInterface.call("sendToJS", iText.text);
}
}
import flash.external.ExternalInterface;
if(ExternalInterface.available)
{
try
{
ExternalInterface.addCallback("sendToFlash", fromJS);
}
catch(e:Error)
{
}
}
function fromJS($value:String):void
{
oText.text = $value;
}
I have been up all night messing around with Papervision. Not much to show yet as I find it very confusing. But I realized that a new Papervision is out. Released August 20, 2008. I recommend anyone using Papervision to get the updates classes as some things have changed and removed. Soooo pick it up people.
P.S. I’ll check the post later for grammar errors, I’m am currently in Zombie mode. ;-) .
Get the New PaperVision
UPDATE
People havee been asking if there is new documentation with this new update. The answer is yes and you can check it out at here
I just checked my email to find that Greensock has come out with a new class. The Custom Ease Class. Now this is a pretty powerful class. It allows you to create custom easing instead of using the default Back, Bounce, Elastic, etc.
Jack “
“
Sometimes the standard easing equations(Elastic, Strong, etc.) don’t give
you quite what you want. This tool allows you to interactively draw a curve
for your own custom easing equation and it even writes the code for you.
Just copy and paste it into your application. The code it writes requires
the gs.easing.CustomEase class which is a membership benefit of Club
GreenSock.
