A little undocumented feature for you that might come in useful, mainly for people who use the Flash 9 Authoring Tool to create their Flash Movies.
Archive for the ‘Old Articles’ Category
Undocumented Actionscript 3
Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006Actionscript 3 - FZip
Monday, November 20th, 2006I must have missed this one in the aggregators, so thought it worth mentioning. Claus Wahlers has put together a rocking Actionscript 3 class that can progressively load and unpack the contents of zip files in Flash Player 9, which is really useful for image galleries and other such applications that involve lots of external files, simply because you can stuff all the files inside just one zip file, stick it on the server and load that into your application, then unpack it on the fly and access the files inside. Checkout FZip.
Flash Plugin Switcher for Firefox
Monday, October 30th, 2006If, like me and many millions of others, you have deserted Internet Explorer, and now choose to use Firefox as your default web browser, then the following little tool is going to come in very handy. Alessandro Crugnola has written a very useful Flash Plugin Switcher for Firefox that sits in the bottom right hand corner of thr browser and allows you to select and quickly switch between different versions of the Flash Player, from Flash Player 9 all the way back to Flash Player 2. A must have in any Flash Developers toolbox.
Flash Player 9 Update Beta
Thursday, October 5th, 2006Adobe have just recently released a beta version of an update to Flash Player 9 that adds new Full Screen capabilities to the Flash Player. This feature was primarily introduced into the update so that video players can go fullscreen, but it has lots of other uses aswell.
Full Screen mode is activated using either Actionscript 2 or Actionscript 3 by setting the value of a new property Stage.displayState, it can only be set in response to a mouse or keyboard event, which stops malicious use of this new feature. Keyboard events do not occur when the Flash Player is in full screen mode, so input fields will not work.
More information on fullscreen mode can be found here.
The new player also introduces some much needed displaylist events, namely ADDED_TO_STAGE and REMOVED_FROM_STAGE and the new player now works with Microsoft Vista.
Y Design Awards - Voting Begins!
Friday, September 15th, 2006The public voting for the first ever Adobe sponsored Y Design awards for Excellence in Digital Design is now open. The Y Design Awards is a new initiative launched as part of the London Design Festival which recognises and celebrates the UK’s leading creative talent demonstrated through the use of digital technology.
In honour of the technology’s 10th anniversary, this year’s award scheme will centre on Macromedia Flash by Adobe, i am honored to be judging the awards.
Seems like this award may become a prestigious one for studio’s silverware cabinets, amongst the ranks of the notorious Rubber Arrow of the Flash Film Festival.
Checkout the list of finalists and vote for your favourites here.
Most Influential Site of the Decade
Wednesday, August 30th, 2006The final vote is live and kicking today. Choose which Flash site you feel is the most influential from the past decade. There have been a tonne of kick-ass sites in that time, but the people have spoken and chosen the final ten candidates for this unique award.
Personally i feel that Yugop has been the most influential site of the past decade from the final list of ten, but i would beg to differ if Praystation was in the list, i presume he wasnt nominated since there isnt a live version of his old site running anymore, but Josh Davis kicked off the whole Flash experimental era.
History of Flash - 10th Anniversary
Tuesday, August 29th, 2006The Flash 10th Anniversary interactive experience is online now for all to see. See and read all about the significant milestones and websites in the past 10 years of Flash. Visit the year 2000 to find your’s truly or 2001 to find Relevare. Also dont forget to checkout the Artist Gallery area containing special 10th anniversary animations from both Nectarine and Mudbubble.
It seems my cartoon character appears at the end of the Nectarine animation for me to say happy birthday aswell 
Flash 8 Source Files - Free for all
Tuesday, August 1st, 2006IFBIN is now completely free to anybody and everybody, no subscription fees whatsoever. Which means that all my Flash 8 Source files are now free to download, amongst hundreds of other examples by some of the best developers in our community. Welcome to IFBIN 2.0 open source.
Apollo Podcast
Saturday, July 15th, 2006If your interested in the future of Flash as a platform, then Apollo is the next new part of the equation bringing the strengths of Flash to the desktop.
All of you should know of Mike Chambers, the community voice and face of Macromedia for along time and the man behind the blogging intiative at Macromedia(you read MXNA right?), and now of course i can only presume he had alot to do with Labs. Mikes latest outreach to the community is a podcast that you can listen to on your way to work or during some downtime (hopefully from now on weekly).
As a member of the Apollo team, Mikes latest podcast contains an interview (more of a discussion) about some of the concerns people have been having about Apollo being a runtime (say like Java or .NET). Speaking with two of the engineers on the team, the discussion should answer all of your concerns.
More good stuff to come, i would imagine. So, subscribe to the podcast and listen on a regular basis for some straight-from-the-horses-mouth information.
Make sure you checkout this weeks update aswell.
Adobe MAX still doesn’t pay speaker expenses!
Monday, July 10th, 2006Aral has the lowdown on why Adobe need to change their policy on covering expenses for presenters at MAX. Controversially in the past they have not paid for speakers flights and/or accomodation for the duration of the conference, similarly the speaker support is apparently “the worst” of all related industry events.
I was hoping that things would change when Adobe took over, but at present, its not looking that way. At $1000 per ticket surely they have some spare cash lying around to cover speaker expenses 
Still waiting for Apollo?
Monday, July 10th, 2006Square Circle website is live!
Thursday, July 6th, 2006Its been along time in the works and the guy’s over at Square Circle have finally got it live. I helped them out during the early stages with some coding for the spinning zoom concept, the quicknav and the interactive telephone in the contacts section. The site is looking slick, awesome visuals and 3d renders, the portfolio section is sweet (great use of Flash video) and the overall experience is a pleasant one. Check it out for yourself. Great job guys!
Flash Monster Trucks
Sunday, July 2nd, 2006Heres an addictive game for you to play during any downtime at work. Clever viral piece made by the gang over at Stimunation. Nice rigid body dynamics.
Flash 9 AS3 Preview
Wednesday, June 28th, 2006Windows users can now download a preview release of Flash 9 on Adobe Labs that is basically the same as Flash 8, but allows Flash Developers/Designers to output their content to Flash Player 9.
There is however one new awesome feature included in there for you to play with, the Document Class feature, which makes it easy to assign an actionscript class to the main timeline (the main timeline then becomes an instance of the specified class) instead of using the old hack which was basically to have something like the following on the first frame of the main timeline:
import com.flashguru.someProject.SomeClass; this.__proto__=SomeClass.prototype; SomeClass['apply']( this , null );
London Flash Platform User Group
Wednesday, June 14th, 2006A new user group has been formed in London to bring together like minded individuals interested in the Flash Platform. The first gathering will take place on the 22nd June at Play Bar on Old Street. Come along, get some drinks down, watch the presentations and talk about all things Flash. More info at www.lfpug.com
Barcelona baby!
Thursday, May 11th, 2006So, a good start to the day on Tuesday, when we started our mission over to Barcelona. We caught the easybus from Baker Street in London and it was supposed to take us to London Luton. There was only me, Tink and Mogs on the bus, so we were having a drink and a chat, literally 10 minutes into the journey, the driver was cruising down the bus lanes on Finchley Road and smashed straight into a little yellow MG, crushing the left hand side and flipping it round 90 degrees.
The poor little car which was being taken for a test drive by the local garage, probably in there for a little service was most likely a write off. My laptop took a beating, but the big beauty is still working, and we were just a little shook up, but luckily nobody was hurt.
We made it to London Luton in the end, after we were put on another coach which didnt have any air-con (hot and sticky) and the rest of the journey was plain sailing. We arrived in Barcelona about 10pm, then after a quick settling into our sweet little apartment in the centre of town, we headed out to explore, naturally the beer started flowing (i dont usually drink beer) when we headed over to the ramblas for a bite to eat. We even had our own live entertainment while we were eating, which consisted of three prostitutes bitch slapping some poor guy with sticks, i guess because he didnt pay or something, classic.
Then we explored the side-streets and ended up in some local Spaniard bar for more beer. We met two American girls and a guy from Canada, guess where in Canada? Edmonton, he he… i was shocked, ive been to Edmonton for Grant Skinners wedding, and obviously Grant is pretty well known around those parts i hear. Anyways, he turned out to be a bit of a nutta, and decided that we should go to the beach at 5am and go skinny-dipping, he was straight in there, swimming away, got out and was shaking away because it was pretty cold
All in all a great night, we didnt go to bed until 8am, so slept until 4 in the afternoon. Lastnight was a great night too, it was Tink’s birthday, which ill blog about later. As for OFFF, we didnt make it to the conference today, since we didnt wake up until 6pm.
Apollo: Flash to jump beyond the browser
Thursday, May 11th, 2006There is an interesting article on CNET which sheds some light on Apollo, the codename for a cross platform runtime that Adobe are working on to take the Flash Player outside of the browser, in other words, Macromedia Central revamped and done properly.
OFFF Barcelona
Monday, May 8th, 2006Been very busy lately, so its time for a little sun and relaxtion. Im heading over to OFFF in Barcelona to get some inspiration and soak in the spanish culture, yay to the siesta! Ill be out there for four days, then we are heading down to Alicante on Costa Blanca for a good 10 days of beach action. Ill be hanging with Tink and Aral is heading over to Barcelona now aswell i hear. If your there, say hi.