Archive for the ‘Adobe AIR’ Category
Help fix Flash’s visible dimensions
Posted by Will | Filed under Adobe AIR, Adobe Catalyst, Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex
Colin Moock, author of the excellent book Essential Actionscript 3.0 has written an interesting blog post regarding an issue which Flash (still) has with finding the visible dimensions of a DisplayObject. The key word there being “visible” as the way Flash currently reports a DisplayObject’s size does not account for things which effect on-screen appearance such as masking. For example if you have a 40×40 DisplayObject with a 20×20 mask the getBounds method, as well as the width and height properties, report the DisplayObject as being 40×40, which is technically correct, but Flash currently has no way of easily reporting the actual visual (masked) size.
Colin has raised this through the Adobe Flash Player and Issue Management System which I urge anyone with even a passing interest in Flash to go and vote for. This is your chance to help shape the future of the Flash player and resolve one of it’s most lacking features.
30+ Great AIR Apps
Posted by Will | Filed under Adobe AIR, Software
Came across a nice round up of some of the better AIR apps available for designers and developers over at Mashable. I find it great to look at what other developers are churning out for the AIR runtime. I’m hoping to spend some time this year learning AIR and Flex so it’s always great to look at other people’s work for inspiration.
Check out the apps over at Mashable.
Distort an image in Flash 10 with DrawTriangles
Posted by Will | Filed under Adobe AIR, Adobe Flash, Experiments, Flash Games
One of the coolest features to come out of Flash Player 10’s new 3D capabilities is an addition to the Graphics class, the DrawTriangles method.
Most Flash designers discover early on that distorting a DisplayObject is impossible through the Flash IDE. This is unfortunately still the case (3D notwithstanding), however by making use of a bit of Actionscript trickery involving DrawTriangles we can create display objects that can be distorted dynamically at run time. Pretty cool I reckon!
This example shows how a Sprite containing a Bitmap fill can have it’s corners dragged, distorting the Sprite’s fill. You will immediately note that this example is not perfect. I’m only using 2 triangles here but it’s safe to say that by increasing the number of triangles will provide better results.
This next example is effectively the same as the above one except we are drawing an animating MovieClip to the BitmapData object used as the Sprite’s fill. The MovieClip is drawn to the BitmapData at the frame rate of the movie giving it an animated effect. This same technique can also be used for full motion video. (more…)
Sending data with LocalConnection in Flash
Posted by Will | Filed under Adobe AIR, Adobe Flash, Advertising, Banners, Experiments, Tutorials, Uncategorized, Web
As a follow up to my previous post titled “How to communicate between multiple Flash files with LocalConnection” I’m going to demonstrate a slightly more advanced way of using the LocalConnection object in Flash. (more…)
