7th November, 2008
While searching for ways to apply a gradient mask to an image I came across basically the best demonstration of how to create a decent reflection using actionscript:
http://pixelfumes.blogspot.com/2005/09/flash-8-bitmapdata-image-reflection.html
31st October, 2008
After quite a lot of effort I managed to convert my old Gallery script into Actionscript Classes, and eventually figured out my mystery of how to link an onEnterFrame event as part of a class to a dynamically created movie clip.
My Scripting Project will be appearing in the top header section of my site:
Also in my search for ways to distort an image to give the impression of perspective I came across this site http://www.osflash.org/sandy, an open source 3D library with many many functions.
16th September, 2008
So for a few days I’ve been experimenting with various bits of code, using a Kirupa tutorial as a starting grounds, in order to create the effect of rendering 3D objects in Flash. It has been a bit hard trying to figure out how to do things but eventually I wrote a few functions that basically put a cube of cubes (the basis for my flash game idea) onto the screen and could be rotated in three dimensions.
This was all well and good but now I have been stumped by figuring out how to sort the z-order and making the drawing more efficient by ignoring parts that are hidden behind other parts.
22nd April, 2008
As part of the latest FRED website update, I’ve been asked to include a twitter feed integrated into the flash file itself. Not knowing much about twitter itself apart from the basics, like knowing I’d have to take data from a feed and have to make some actionscript that parses the XML, I started the necessary research to see what people had done before me.
It is fortunate then, that I stumbled across this post, Twitter Issues, which describes a scenario that is not unfamiliar to me. It also provides a solution which will ultimately save me time later on! Basically, since some major security updates in Flash quite a long while ago, it hasn’t been able to access data on any server different to the one it is hosted on without express permission from the other server in the form of a special file called crossdomain.xml. I had the same issue when developing the original FRED Roles database stored on one site and accessed via flash from the other. Now Twitter themselves could have solved the issue by simply using a * (star) in their file to allow access from anyone, but for whatever reason they chose not to.
13th March, 2008
As a follower of the Half Life 2 series, naturally I have tried Portal and was kept amused by it for a little while, solving a series of puzzles with the portal gun set by a mad AI computer obsessed with cake.
However in my search for ideas for something I could make in Flash for my final year autumn term module Scripting for Digital Media (IDAT311) – (I am thinking I may as well get a long headstart on as much as I can now) – I found an amazing recreation of the portal game in a 2D Flash form. It can be found at http://portal.wecreatestuff.com/ – Portal: The Flash Version
4th January, 2008
An opportunity to work on a flash based website came up shortly before christmas where the company previously named ‘Uncle Fred’ had rebranded themselves to simply FRED and wanted their site updated to reflect these changes. Their website can be found at http://www.fredstalent.com.
The updated version is currently being tested at http://www.srjm.co.uk/FRED/
6th November, 2007
I was given a task to create a gallery in flash that cycled through portfolio images like so many you see.
Here is an example of my initial efforts. Its set for 40 pictures at 1 second per picture and doesn’t loop but flicks everything back to the start in quite an impressive (if accidental) manner.
31st October, 2007
The next plan was to enable the flash in my new design’s header to change the dimensions of the div it was sat in so that for most the time it takes up less room, but when it needs it the space expands to allow for larger content there. I had already anticipated doing something like this so had included the mootools JS library at the very start of building my new design.
http://www.broken-links.com/2007/05/01/a-mootools-quickstart-guide/
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