July 2008 – onebyonedesign

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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“Fleximagically Searchable” – By the Rules

by Devon O.· July 13, 2008· in Flash· 9 comments

During my usual daily blog browse, I ran across this interesting contest by Ryan Stewart. The idea, or at least so it seemed to me, was to see if the new method of swf indexing being hammered out by Google and Adobe would be capable of making content loaded dynamically into swf files searchable. Now, in my opinion, that probably isn’t possible. Of course I have been known to be wrong once or twice. It seems to do that though, Google would have to sniff through the .swf files and discover links to other files (.xml, .php, etc.) then follow those links to see what they contained and index that content. Well, okay, it may be possible, certainly. But, is that what Google is really up to – I doubt it. Regardless, though, it sounded like a great idea for a contest and I thought, hey, maybe someone just might figure out a way of linking to an external file that Google could come along and index. So, I sat down and hammered out my attempt. But then I went back and read through all the comments on Ryan’s blog post. It seems someone actually went out and bought the domain http://www.fleximagically-searchable.com/. Not only that, but they […]
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Two Flash Website Generation Tools

by Devon O.· July 10, 2008· in AIR, Flash· 12 comments

For those of you who regularly use swfobject, expressInstall, and swffit (formerly “fitflash”) for your Flash websites/applications, I just developed a couple tools that will make you love me. The first is just a simple html template that can be used with Flash. Download the template here and extract the html file to your HTML directory (on a Windows machine that’s at C:\Documents and Settings\[USER]\Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe\Flash CS3\en\Configuration\HTML – mac users are on their own). Now open Flash and go to the HTML publish settings. In the “Template” drop down box, you’ll find one named “SWFObject, SWFfit, and ExpressInstall”. Select that and you’re good to go. A word of advice though – to include a document title and a description in your generated html, in Flash you’ll need to go to “Modify” -> “Document” and set the title and description there. The swffit dimensions will be set according to the dimensions of the .swf file. Long story short, you will generate a .html file that looks like the one below straight out of Flash. [crayon-609b0fafa8c59693555384/] Of course the trouble with that is, you will still have to manually add the swfobject.js, swffit.js, and expressInstall.swf files yourself, and that’s a lot of extra […]
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Active Window(S) Blur

by Devon O.· July 06, 2008· in Actionscript, Flash· 12 comments

After taking another look at this post, I came up with a way of making multiple windows that will all blur the same image. I have to admit, though, I’m not particularly fond nor proud of the way I did it. The trouble is this: a masked display object can only have a single mask – so all items which will be used as a mask must be added to a single encompassing parent. But you would also like each mask item to be draggable along with the window it “rides behind”. Therefore, ideally, you’d like each mask item to be a child of the window instance (as I did it in the previous post). But there lies the rub. A display object can have only a single parent, hence you can’t add the child to both the mask and the window. The solution I came up with was this: add the masking item to the mask instance and move the masking item with the window using an ENTER_FRAME event (rather than a parent-child relationship). If anyone has a more elegant solution, please post a comment. I’m probably overlooking something simple, but brilliant… The MWindowBlur (Multiple Window Blur) class: [crayon-609b0fafad261311627268/] The […]
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Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God

by Devon O.· July 04, 2008· in Flash, Liberty, Life· 0 comments

Every Fourth of July, I like to sit down and reflect a little on the meaning of the holiday. You can keep your Christmases, and Thanksgivings – in my opinion, Independence Day is the most important of the American holidays. It’s not just a time to get a day off of work, consume mass quantities of beer like a conehead, and blow stuff up (though I have nothing against those things). The Fourth of July is a celebration of a nation that stood up against tyranny. It is the celebration of (an albeit failed) Revolution, and we should acknowledge that while the holiday is still legally recognized in the U.S. Consider for a second the excitement on the street in those times. As Bob Dylan said, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. It was time for a new form of government and the citizens of budding nation not only recognized the fact, but took Action. What was the main purpose for a government at all, you ask. Well, they spelled it out quite clearly in the Declaration: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed […]
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Yahtzee! Too Late for a Contest, but Never too Late to Play

“Fleximagically Searchable” – By the Rules

Two Flash Website Generation Tools

Active Window(S) Blur

Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God

Devon O. Wolfgang

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