I saw this effect a long time ago, and wanted to use it in a project, but after about ten minutes of searching for the original, I gave up and just decided to make my own.
Click on the image above to view it in action.
This is just a basic bitmap effect that uses BitmapData to draw an image, with the pixels spilling down from the top in a waterfall-type effect. The fun thing about this is that since the source of the effect needs to implement IBitmapDrawable, you can supply just about anything as the source. In the example below, select “This Panel” to watch the options panel be redrawn. The end effect is that each individual piece of the panel is “beamed down” on it’s own. The “Flow” image is another favorite of mine.
The ’speed’ option is simply the number of milliseconds used in the Timer to execute the effect.
Source is also provided, just right-click on the example to get it.
If you’re working on a project that’s prone to timing out on you, and throwing those “A script has executed for longer than the default timeout period of 15 seconds” errors, here’s a quick tip for you until fix the bugs causing the timeout.
Just set the scriptTimeLimit attribute of your <mx:Application> tag to a smaller value, like 3 seconds. That way you won’t need to wait around for a while waiting for your app to crash so you can get back to debugging the problem. It’ll crash in about 3 seconds instead of 15, or even a full minute later.
Obviously, the ideal solution is to fix the bug causing the timeout, but while you’re debugging, this should help to ease the pain a little bit.
LiveDocs: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/mx/core/Application.html#scriptTimeLimit
While working on creating an installer badge for an AIR application I’m working on, I kept receiving the following error when trying to install the application: Error# 2032
After doing a bit of Googling, the most common solution I found was to make sure that the MIME-type for AIR was set on your server so that it would recognize the AIR filetype.
You can do this by adding the following line to the .htaccess file for your server: (I’m not a server guru, so this may not work in all cases, but it works on the Apache server I’m using.)
AddType application/vnd.adobe.air-application-installer-package+zip .air
After adding this I was still receiving the error. So… a little more time searching, and I found another piece to the solution - I had been using a relative path name in the flashVars for my installer badge. That doesn’t work. Apparently, while you can use a relative path for the thumbnail image displayed by the badge, the actual path to the .air installer file must be the full path to the file. (http://www.domain.com/pathToInstaller.air).
Since it took me a little bit longer to find that part of the solution, I wanted to post it here, just to add one more place where you might be able to find it. These aren’t the only two reasons why you could receive this error, but at least it’s two more possible solutions.
SSBs? Site-Specific Browsers, courtesy of Fluid.app.
Fluid is a slick little app that allows you to create unique browsers for a particular website. These new browsers appear as regular applications that you can leave in your Dock, or Applications folder. In the screenshot above, you can see the Unfuddle app that I made in about five minutes earlier today.
Pretty handy for those sites you tend to visit a lot, and leave open all day long. Plus, if a site supports it, you can get some fancy Coverflow browsing of the links in the page as well.
FluidApp.com
I seem to have an addiction when it comes to finding the best bug tracker out there - I’ve never been really been satisfied with the ones I’ve used in the past, and I’m just too lazy to write my own. As a result, I’ve ended up playing and installing a bunch of different apps, trying to find the bug tracker I like the most.
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Because all my friends are on Twitter.
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Just got back from seeing Indiana Jones 4 this afternoon with the rest of the mediaRAIN crew.
Indy rocked.
(I wasn’t exactly a huge fan of the ending, but I was more than satisfied with it.)
By now you’ve seen and heard plenty about Flash Player 10. One feature that I’m in love with right now is the new text rendering provided by Saffron 3.1. Among other things, this provides better anti-aliasing for fonts, including device fonts.
Why does this matter? Because now you can use device fonts in your TextFields, and do things like adjust their opacity, or rotate them without needing to embed the font. How sexy is that? Obviously, if you’re using a custom font, you’ll need to embed that, but for device fonts, it’s no longer a requirement just to adjust the alpha value of a TextField.
Check this out (You’ll need Flash Player 10 installed).
Download the source: AstroTest.as.
This is a really simple demo, but it’s enough to get the point across.
The last project I had the privilege of working on while at Footnote.com launched earlier today.
Interactive Vietnam Veterans Memorial
You can view the entire wall, and do more than just view the names of the men killed in the war - you learn about these men.
Initially, the info provided about these guys is just the basics - birth/death, military info, etc., however, as time goes on, and more content is added, you’ll be able to see photos, and read histories of these men. Much of this content will be user-contributed, by the friends and family of the men memorialized by this monument.
Working on this project was great - it was a chance to stretch my talents, and see what I could do as a Flash developer, but it also gave me a greater appreciation for the lives these men gave. I wasn’t alive during this time period, and so I can’t pretend to understand the full impact of the Vietnam War, or the impact that had on the lives of the people that lived it, but working on this project at least made a bit of history feel a bit more “real” to me.
With the recent release of Safari 3.1, I was curious to see a before and after comparison of how Safari 3.0 and 3.1 would render the Acid 3 test. For those who don’t know, the Acid tests are designed to determine how well a browser follows various web standards. Currently, no browsers pass the Acid3 test with 100%, but they are getting closer.
Once I checked out the two versions of Safari, I got curious to see how well some other browsers performed. And so here are the results of my completely unscientific testing, sorted by the respective scores of each browser. Now, on to the results!
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