FlashGuru Blog

Continuing on along his generous streak, Andre Michelle has provided yet more cool open source for people to learn from, this time around its a ball that bounces around on a bezier curve, check out the code and try to make sense of it, the math behind it could be very handy to know for games and such.

Lenoardo has put some imagination into this interactive e-card system, customisable snowball fight e-cards, love it! Let your friends and family know you are thinking about them by sending them a big fat gravelly snowball, maybe they will send you one back.

Firefly™ is a revolutionary suite of components for Flash MX that lets developers retrieve, display, edit and update XML data from within any Flash application. Firefly can be used directly with Flash MX or as a powerful enhancement to Macromedia’s new Flash Remoting MX technology. Firefly lets you build data-rich Internet applications within minutes of installing. All you need is Firefly, Flash MX and data. Aral Balkan has written an in-depth review of the component set which will help you decide whether or not you should get your credit card out and buy them already!

Andre Michelle has been doing a bit of playing around with 3D Actionscript and the Actionscript Drawing API of late, and he has come up with a wicked example of a Tessalated Geosphere using actionscript, whats better is that he is also sharing the sourcecode for it, which also includes a very fast rendering engine. On a sidenote, be sure to checkout some of the studies on his site.

The Component Headquarters site has just opened its doors to the public. The Component Headquarters is a lightweight Flash MX Component Exchange, featuring a resolution independent interface, one of the few sites out there to offer complex resizing of interface elements. Weighing only 38kb (other flash-based component sites are more than two times the size) it sports discussion threads, user ratings and example sources for each component, along with all the other expected features. You are invited to visit the site and submit your components. Also, within a couple of days they will be releasing the window component with which the whole site is built, so stay tuned for that.

Robert Penner’s Programming With Flash MX book is now available to buy in the shops(might have been for a while actually). Eric Dolecki has made an agreement with the books publisher, which allows him to distribute a free chapter from the book on his website, in PDF format, so if you want to do some actionscript related reading, give it a whirl.

Ive heard so many people winge on the many community forums and mailing lists lately about the onLoad event handler not working with loadMovie and although i posted a fix for the problem sometime ago, i found this very small and functional fix that does the same thing, a while ago on the Flashcoders Mailing List and so if you see the question, forward people to that page.

Wildform Linx is an easy-to-use Flash editor with a WYSIWYG interface that lets you drag and drop files onto a timeline and create Flash files without knowing Flash. With Linx you can import, edit, manipulate and combine virtually any type of Flash SWF file, from simple images, to complex animations, audio and video. You can also directly import image and audio files. Using Linx with any SWF exporting software (such as Wildform’s Flix and SWfX) it is easy to create dynamic content for both web deployment and offline distribution on CDs and intranets, including:

1. Presentations & Slideshows
2. Demos & tutorials
3. Banner ads & buttons
4. Edited Flash videos with captions & subtitles
5. Video & Audio Jukeboxes

Pre-order your copy of the sequel to Actionscript: The Definitive Guide by Colin Moock, now updated to cover everything new in Flash MX Actionscript, bound to be one of the best 50 dollars you will spend for the next year or so. Read a sample chapter, Chapter 10 - Events and Event Handling as apart of a new article on the Macromedia Designer & Developer Center, should give you a good feel for the contents of the book.

Francois Dejardin is the developer responsible for creating this Flash based frontend for searching the highly popular Flashcoders archives, a very good collection of answers to every question you can ever come up with.

Version One of the SciTE Flash Actionscript Editor has been released, which is currently looking rather nifty with features such as; custom settings optimized for ActionScript editing, a Flash lexer (based on the C++ lexer) - used for code folding, a Keywords file - used for syntax highlighting, an API file - used for “code hints” and Flush, by Robin Debreuil - used to export/test movies without ever leaving SciTE|Flash. Check it out and see what you think.

SWF Kit is made by TopCMM Software Technologies and is based around a set of commands called FFish Script. These commands are structured much like actionscript, so understanding them should be easy. Among the things you can do with SWF Kit: Send and receive email, Reading and writing files, Creating or removing directories, Accessing the system registry, Playing multimedia devices and recording multimedia resource files through Microsoft Media Control Interface, Creating shortcuts, Running applications, Getting special folders, Showing the general dialogs include the browseforfolder dialog, Controlling windows, Retrieving system information, Connect database with ADO, Embed an ActiveX control… The list goes on, but should give you an idea of what is possible with projectors made from Flash files. The GUI of the app itself seems a bit amateurish, but the features speak for themselves. Download your fully functional evaluation version now! [Via FlashMagazine]

Volume 2 of the Macromedia Developer Resource Kit is available today. This volume contains Flash, Flash Remoting, ColdFusion, Fireworks and Dreamweaver content. The Flash content includes: Flash UI Component Set 4, which includes the following components:

1. Rich Text Editor
2. Smart Combo Box
3. Advanced Calendar
4. Color Picker
5. Simple Menu

MyPhoto Rich Internet Application : Sample Application. A ton of chapters from some of the newest and most popular books on creating Flash content, and Rich Internet applications. The August to October Designer and Developer Center Archive. You can find more information on Volume 2 here, and you can purchase it here either as a disc or electronic download.