Flash UI Panel to Edit the Properties of Multiple Bitmaps

by Devon O.· August 27, 2008· in Flash, Life· 20 comments
Long ago (MX 2004 days, I believe) there existed a great custom Flash panel released by Fuel Industries that would allow you to set the export properties of multiple library items simultaneously. Say, for example, you have a hundred little bitmap items in your library that you’re using for an interface and you want to allow smoothing on all of them. Ordinarily, you’d have to go through each and every one, open up the properties panel and check the Allow Smoothing check box. Hopefully you wouldn’t skip one. With this Fuel panel though, you’d highlight all the bitmap instances and click a single button one time to change them all. I’d nearly forgotten about this extremely useful little plugin until I ran across this blog post by Matt Wright. Since I no longer have that plugin myself, I figured I’d make one. It was a pretty quick and easy thing to do. I can’t remember what all that Fuel plugin was capable of, but mine handles Bitmap objects only. Basically, it’s just as I described – you highlight multiple Bitmaps in your .fla’s library, adjust the settings (allow smoothing, lossy/lossless, jpg compression quality), then click on the “execute” button and – presto […]
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enabled v. mouseEnabled & Other Stuff

by Devon O.· August 20, 2008· in Actionscript, Flash, Life· 0 comments
In my last post (about the OBO_BoxTransition), Senocular had mentioned in a comment that the demo app was throwing an error when double clicking. While he never did come back to say what the error was, he’s a pretty sharp cookie, so I figured there had to be something to it. So, I finally downloaded the Flash 10 Debug player (which, incidentally, is now available), ran the .swf in it and saw immediately what the problem was. The bottom line is that the buttons, which I knew should not be clicked in rapid succession, were still firing an Event.CLICK event even after I had called a disabling method which, in short, looped through an array of SimpleButton instances (don’t know why I didn’t choose a Vector – still getting used to the idea, I suppose) and set each member’s enabled property to false. You’d think that would make the SimpleButton’s unclickable, but you’d be wrong. For a brief moment, even with a false enabled property, they are still able to be clicked and will still dispatch the corresponding event. On an impulse, however, I made the quick change from enabled to mouseEnabled and – shazam! – no more double click blues. I am not sure why […]
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3D Box Transition Effect in Flash Player 10

by Devon O.· August 14, 2008· in Actionscript, Flash, Life· 13 comments
Playing with another transition effect made possible by the 3d capabilities of Flash Player 10, gave rise to the example below. The initial object seen is just a quickly thrown together MovieClip to demonstrate that interactive items can be transited as well as static images. After that first mc, though, all you’ll see is a bunch of random movie posters. Because I added a new transition to my transitions package, I touched up the OBO_BillboardTransition class a little bit and made both implement an ITransition interface. If interested, all script is below: The interface: [crayon-6144f53059ab3432787149/] The OBO_BoxTransition class: [crayon-6144f53059abf048928460/] The OBO_BillboardTransition class (same effect as my last post, so no need for a demo .swf): [crayon-6144f53059ac2729352313/] And finally, a document class to test the box transition: [crayon-6144f53059ac9993523234/] And completely offtopic, but while doing a little google surfing after the Virgin Prunes, I discovered this lengthy but interesting read on the Goth music scene in England back in the day. Like strolling down the halls of high school. Interesting and entertaining stuff for folks into that sort of thing. You know who you are…
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The Tendency Towards Web Dependency

by Devon O.· August 02, 2008· in Life· 2 comments
One thing I’ve happened to notice all too painfully clearly over the last couple weeks is that, as more tools bring the web to our desktops (AIR, Google Apps, etc.), we, at a probably inversely proportionate rate, rely even more on the web. Let me paint a quick background picture to illustrate what the heck I’m talking about. In my current situation, due to circumstances beyond my control, I mainly rely on two computers. One has an internet connection, but does not allow me the necessary permissions to install software or modify it in any way. The other is my personal laptop with which I am free to do anything I want – except connect to the internet. So, should I want to install any apps, widgets, software, fonts, toys, etc. on my laptop, I must download it from computer A., save it to a thumb drive, transfer it to laptop B. and install away. Now 8 out of 10 times while this may be mildly annoying it works perfectly well. However, a week or so ago, my Ipod up and died on me. A nuisance, but not unexpected – these things happen. In the good old days, this just meant I would have to download the most recent […]
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Yahtzee! Too Late for a Contest, but Never too Late to Play

by Devon O.· July 27, 2008· in Flash, Life· 4 comments
Long ago and an ocean away, I made a nice little Yahtzee game in Flash that many folks (myself included) seemed to love. Unfortunately, “something” (I never did come around and track down exactly what that something was) broke the hiscore saving script around the same time Flash 8 appeared (yes, this was back late MX 2004 days). Well, no one likes playing an online game if you can’t save a high score, so interest quickly dwindled. I always told myself I’d make a new version at some later date when, just the other day, I happened to see an online game creation contest posted by dice.com. Well, here I’ve been floating around off the eastern U.S. for the past fortnight or two with nothing to do but go slowly mad so I figured this was the perfect opportunity for my Yahtzee game rekindling. Unfortunately, I apparently don’t read real good as, after 3 days of fiddling around with this thing in my spare time, I discovered the contest ended on July 21 (I could have sworn the rules said the 27th). I really believe staying too long on a ship at sea corrodes intelligence. Everyone just shuffles around in […]
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Devon O. Wolfgang

AIR | Unity3D | AR/VR

Unity Certified Developer

Technical Reviewer of “The Essential Guide to Flash CS4 AIR Development” and “Starling Game Development Essentials”

Reviewer of “The Starling Handbook”

Unity Engineer at Touch Press.

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