“FontBox” – ComboBox for Font Selection

Many moons ago someone over at the Kirupa forum asked how to create a combo box that could display a list of fonts in their “natural state”. Sounded pretty interesting so I whipped together a quick example that made use of some graphics in the .fla library. It was nice and worked, but I thought [...]

Adobe Gone Wild

Wow – what a busy day for Adobe. AIR 1.0 and Flex 3.0 final versions finally released today. Rather an odd thing as it seems I’ve been doing AIR projects for ages. One wonderful thing I noticed right away: after installing the Adobe AIR runtime file (short for Adobe Adobe Integrated Runtime runtime – redundancy aplenty in that [...]

Blist

So I just signed up for an account with this new Flex based online spreadsheet/database application, blist (“web list”), and my first impression is that this is one hell of a sleek and sexy app. Haven’t actually played with it long enough to guage its usefulness or usability, but it sure is a purty thang. Among other things, [...]

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Sleep Has His House


“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law…”

ImageInfo Desktop AIR Application

Inspired by a forum post over at CreativeIreland, I thought I’d sit down and create a simple AIR application that could read the metadata contained in image files. Unfortunately, reading image metadata turned out to be not as simple as I had hoped. Thankfully, my friend Google turned me on to the wonderful and lightweight [...]

FlashDevelop Update

Just happened to notice FlashDevelop 3.0.0 Beta 6 was released today. I love this software! A peek at the change log: * General UI and localization fixes and improvements * New Bookmarks panel added for an overview of all your open documents bookmarks * Captures Flash CS3 compiler errors in FD results panel when CS3 [...]

The Old Snow Trick – In the Third Dimension

While working on a little Valentine’s Day ecard for the most wonderful wife in the world, I suddenly had an idea… Snow effects have been done in Flash since at least Flash 5 (maybe even Flash 4 if I think back hard enough), but I have yet to see a Flash snow storm in “true [...]

Particle Pictures with Papervision3d

Man, the papervision api keeps changing so rapidly, I should get frequent flier miles on my tortoiseSVN for all the downloads. It’s getting hard to keep up. In any case, though, I just had to play with the particle updates made to both the Great White and Effects branches on Feb 10. To do what I [...]

Looping Progressively Downloaded .flv Files

I’ve seen this asked several times in as many different forums, so thought I’d try to help with a little class I made a few months ago.

Updates to fPlayer

Well, it was just brought to my attention that the youtube video downloader feature of my AIR .flv player, fPlayer, was broken. Doing a 2 minute Google search made it clear that Youtube had, once again, changed the obfuscation algorithm that hides their actual video files. Doing another Google search (about a half hour this time) showed [...]

Sine Language

Not sure exactly how useful this effect may be, but here’s a little something I was playing around with and thought I’d share.

Image Viewer Test

Just a quick test to see if I can get this sliding thumbnail/image viewer thing to work in Wordpress.. Here’s hoping…

Auto Resizing Popups with Actionscript

While, normally I dislike popups, they are definitely an occasional necessary evil. This little utility class can make them much easier to create. Simply pass it the path of an image file (i.e. a .jpg) and it will open up a popup window containing that image and automatically resize itself to fit the picture. Only [...]

“Double Sided Plane” with Papervision

Here’s a little trick I learned from playing with After Effects (“postcards in space”, man). If you’d like to have a double sided Plane object (playing card, flipping piece of paper, etc), simply create a DisplayObject3D instance, add your two sides as planes, push one side back a single pixel on the z axis, then [...]

Singularity?

Being the armchair quantum physicist I am, the name of Aral Balkan’s secret new project is rather intriguing. But who am I kidding – curiousity has taken hold and I am dying to know what it is. So much in fact, I’ve thrown all principle out the window and am now advertising on my blog. It better not [...]

Mini Memory

While playing around with papervision3d and helping the wife with a little school project, came up with this little mini version of the memory card game.