I'm So Interactive » Blog

Protected: Care2 Test Post, Large Petition

admin — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 20:12:09 +0000

Protected: Care2 Test Post, Small Petition

admin — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 18:26:04 +0000

San Flashcisco Video Stream

admin — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 02:54:31 +0000

This is the live stream from the San Flashcisco User Group meeting at Adobe headquarters. The topic today is Adobe CS5. There are so many new features, I don’t even know where to begin…

Live video chat by Ustream

Adobe Max

admin — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 02:26:18 +0000

Vizio Developer Platform?

admin — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 17:32:15 +0000

I saw this video on CNET today and was struck by how cool it would be to develop some widgets for use on HDTVs.

Don’t Use Copy Motion as ActionScript 3.0

admin — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 20:43:04 +0000

Today I was working with an animation that a designer had built, and converting it into a format that could be translated into several languages. The designer had built a bunch of animations on the timeline, and several of the timeline animations had embedded text fields that needed to be regionalized via XML. My first idea was to copy the motion of these timeline-animated text fields using the “Copy Motion as ActionScript 3.0…” right-click option. This takes the timeline animation and converts it into an instance of the Motion animation engine. My idea was that I could generate my regionalized text field dynamically based on the language on the host computer, and pass this text field to the generated animation code as the target. This sounds all well and good, until you actually try to use the code that it generates.

When running the code, you will get the following error:

ReferenceError: Error #1069: Property instance1 not found on [class path] and there is no default value.

Where “instance1″ can be anything from “instance1″ to “instance99″ or higher. It’s as if the Animator class is looking for the declaration of the object instance and it’s not getting created. I thought at first that it had something to do with the Automatically declare stage instances setting, but it doesn’t make a difference if it’s checked or not.

People have logged this bug here on the Adobe Bugs database.

Flash and Physics

admin — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 01:09:08 +0000

I’ve been experimenting with the physics engines that are available for ActionScript 3.0 for an upcoming project. The project has elements of 3D, so at first I was only looking at the engines that had been ported to use some sort of 3d engine like Papervision, or my personal favorite, Away3D. Falling into this category would be only two that I know of–WOW Physics Engine and JigLib for Flash. Both of these engines are very sparse as far as tutorials or getting started guides, or even documentation for that matter. This is expected, as both are in early alpha or beta versions, and have a long way to go before they can be considered stable for production use.

Then I found Box2D for Flash, which is a port of the same library for C++. Although it doesn’t have native support for 3D, it does have the best collision detection of the bunch, as well as the fastest response times (which I’m sure has a lot to do with the fact that it’s only calculating 2d transformations).

So here is my first example of what combining the Away3d library with the Box2d library. This demo itself is a port from the same example made by Billy Lamberta here, except for the fact that he used Papervision and I used Away3d.

You can pick up and throw the blocks with your mouse, and they will collide with the “walls” of the swf as well as the other blocks.

Edit: You can download the source code here. This is meant to compile in Flex Builder, but should work in the Flash IDE if you add the Base.as class as the Document Class in a new .fla.

Simple AS3 Flickr Library Example

admin — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 01:07:07 +0000

EDIT: I have updated the zip file to work with the latest version of AS3FlickrLib. The AS3FlickrLib was changed to reference classes from the AS3CoreLib repository, so I added that to the source path, and I changed the tweening engine to TweenMax. All source files are in the zip, so you should be able to just download the zip, enter in your api and secret, and be good to go.

I am building a site right now that requires a simple way for the site owner to add images to their Projects section. I usually use SlideShowPro for this, but since they have only released an AS 2.0 version, and this site is built in AS 3.0, it’s not an option.

I was trying to think up a simple way to allow a not very tech-savvy site owner a very simple way to add photos to their projects section without having to edit XML, log in to their FTP server, and all that business. I recalled that Flickr has an API, and that Adobe had an AS 3.0 wrapper library to handle interfacing with the Flickr API called the AS3FlickrLib.

So I downloaded the FlickrLib and started to dig in. One major problem–there is only one example file, and it’s an MXML file. Not only that, it’s an example for creating an authenticated application that has full permissions to read/write data on your Flickr account. This is way too much for what I was trying to do. All I wanted was a simple example on how to grab photos from a person’s public photo stream! I looked all over the place for an example, but there was none.

Finally I dug in to the Flickr documentation and created a very simple thumbnail image loader on my own. The code is ugly and not optimized by any means, but I only spent a few minutes on it.

You can download the source files here, and see an example here. To make it work, you will need your own Flickr API Key, Tweener, and the AS3FlickrLib.