Archive for the ‘Cell Paint’ Category
Introducing CellPaint.com
Posted by Will | Filed under Adobe Flash, Cell Paint
While it is far from finished and not without it’s bugs but I figured now is as good a time as any to introduce the project my Actionscript 3.0 based painting application is to be used for, cellpaint.com. This is a personal project of mine which allows users to come and… well… paint a cell.
The idea is people will come and create an artwork right there within flash using the painting tools and submit it. No need to know photoshop or stuff around with uploads. The idea is influenced slightly by the million dollar homepage but being free to users.
At the moment anyone can come and paint a cell without being logged in as this feature is yet to be fully implemented.
Please note that the server I am currently running this on is pretty average and am about to move it to a new one. Having said that please come and check it out and draw something. I would love to hear your feedback.
G’day World!
Posted by Will | Filed under Cell Paint
Yesterday I spent the day tweaking a few more things in my paint application. Specifically I’ve been running some test on the send-to-server feature. The functionality of this is handled by AMFPHP with Adobe’s JPGEncoder building the ByteArray. At the moment I can send any image drawn within the application to my server simply by pressing spacebar. AMFPHP receives the ByteArray and writes it to my server as a jpg with a randomly generated filename and returns the absolute path to flash. I’m surprised how fast this is with a round trip of maybe less than 4 seconds.
I’ve been thinking of how to spam proof this. One way I am considering is to actually track the time spent with “pen to paper”. Flash will then only enable the send-to-server functionality once x amount of drawing time has passed. This should stop the ability to upload blank images as well as simple squiggles that can be done in a matter of seconds. Naturally the php side of things will need similar spam proofing in case someone desires to crack open the swf with a decompiler to get past these client side checks.
Left shows the image inside flash and right the uploaded image in firefox.
New Painter Layout
Posted by Will | Filed under Cell Paint
Since I haven’t posted in a little while I thought I would take the time to show a screen shot of the most recent version of my Actionscript 3.0 painting application. As you can see, the tools and canvas now both live within their own panels. The beauty of this is that nothing is ‘anchored’ anymore as the panels are draggable.
Previously the sliders for the eraser and brush tools had their own panels which were constantly visible on the stage. Now they sit neatly in the canvas panel and fade in and out when switching between tools. Much less cluttered now.
As mentioned in my last post I have had difficulty finding a way to give each layer it’s own opacity slider. At this stage I have abandoned this idea as I have spent many hours now trying to get this to work. I was left with the option to either have an opacity slider for the brush OR the layer but not both. I feel being able to adjust the opacity of the brush is more important (though I’m still disappointed not being able to have both 
);
Layer previews
Posted by Will | Filed under Cell Paint
Just showing that I have added layer previews to the layer palette which update in realtime. Layers can now be merged down by pressing Ctrl + E. I will eventually add a button for this aswell.
Unfortunately I’ve hit a bit of a snag with the implementation of the opacity slider for the specific layers. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to get it working properly for the last week and still no success.
I’m feeling pretty disheartened about the whole thing but I’ll keep soldiering on. My only concern is having to ditch the opacity slider on the layers palette if I can’t find a solution
