FITC Amsterdam – Day 2 in a Nutshell

by Devon O.· February 24, 2009· in Flash, Life· 1 comments tags: amsterdam, FITC
Started out the day with Andre Michelle’s “Boing-Bumm-Tschak (Flash 10 Sound API)” presentation. Very beautiful stuff. The biggest thing learned here is that manipulating sound is not so different from manipulating graphic items. That is, reverb is nothing more than a basic “easeout” formula and flanging is just elasticity applied to sound. Some useful tips he shared: use linked lists as much as possible, never create objects at runtime as it’s wildly costly – recycle them instead and, of course, use a good coding structure. He ended the presentation with a look at the hobnox audiotool which was just insane. I ended the presentation by introducing myself and letting him know that the little “Behind the Curtain Coding Award” that’s been displayed on his website’s front page for years is there largely due to me (well, me and Robert Reich – the old BTC coding mods). He seemed mildly bemused, but didn’t really know what to say. I just ducked out as a line was forming up behind me. Next up was Lee Brimelow’s “Flash Platform Polymath” presentation. Here Lee gave a good rundown of what disciplines a Flasher should be comfortable with to move ahead these days: visual design, audio/video/motion, […]
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FITC Amsterdam – Day 1 in a Nutshell

by Devon O.· February 23, 2009· in Flash, Life· 4 comments
Just got back to the great loft apartment I’m staying at in Amsterdam and thought I’d jot down some impressions thoughts and notes of Day One of the sold out FITC conference while they’re still fresh in me little noggin. First up was the Keynote opening featuring Serge Jespers, Lee Brimelow, Mike Chambers, and Paul Something from De Monster. Lee Brimelow promised Adobe was looking into CS4 stability issues then gave an interesting little tip about the new Deco tool in Flash. Seems the tool is powered by editable javascript files that can be customized to do what you want. He gave no example, but it got me thinking and I can’t wait to get back on my own pc and try some things. Mike Chambers pointed out that AIR has reached 100 million installs in the year it’s been around and a new minor release is scheduled in the very near future. Paul came out to show what can be done in AIR by demo’ing a De Monster app, Blackbox – a device which allows multiple designers and developers to share files -which I cannot wait to try out. Serge Jespers came out to talk a bit about Flash […]
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CSS Background-Color && Flash TextFields

by Devon O.· February 08, 2009· in Actionscript, AIR, Flash· 10 comments
So, the other day I needed to add a background color to a TextField in Flash. I don’t mean a rectangular area of color such as the backgroundColor property of a TextField would produce, but irregularly sized rectangles that varied by the width of each line of text in the dynamic TextField. Basically, I needed to be able to set the css background-color property of the TextField. Now admittedly, it’s been some time since I’ve messed with css in Flash, so I was hoping that background-color was now supported. A quick peek at the docs, though, said that wasn’t the case. Of course I tried it anyway – you never know if you may just turn up an undocumented little feature. Of course, there was no joy. My next thought was perhaps by playing with the setSelection() method and alwaysShowSelection property of the TextField, I could somehow finesse a different colored background and text color, but it didn’t take too long to abandon that line of attack. Finally I said, nuts to all that, and just created a class that extends Sprite, but adds a TextField instance and uses TextLineMetrics to create blocks of color the width of each line […]
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R.I.P Lux

by Devon O.· February 07, 2009· in Life· 0 comments
Another great American hero gone on February 4. Lux Interior of the Cramps, dead of a heart condition at the age of 62 (God, I’m old)… Rolling Stone news article here and great live video here. Sad day…
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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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