If you’re an ActionScript programmer and you haven’t checked up on #tweetcoding, you owe it to yourself to take the rest of the day off and look it up. #tweetcoding is an ActionScript coding competition, organised by Grant Skinner, where you have exactly 140 characters (a tweet) to program something interesting. You might think that [...]
Inspired by a reader question (keep them coming, I love those), I got into the subject of motion tracking in Flash. Following the project Natal announcement, I expect motion tracking will become huge over the next few months. So while I’m searching for my webcam, here are a few pointers to get you started. Neuro [...]
Over the last year or two, developing 3D applications in Flash has become increasingly feasible, for almost any ActionScript developers. A number of open source 3D engines, like Sandy 3D, have popped up. Combined with the incredible FlashDevelop, any one can get started, right away. However, because FlashDevelop does not have the authoring tools of [...]
Flash has become the de-facto standard for all kinds of web animations. One of the main reasons, is that it offers an impressive array of bitmap manipulation functions. Out of the box it probably has one of the richest API’s to manipulate bitmaps, vectors and even animation. One of those possibilities is masking, which I [...]
If you’ve been wanting to get your feet wet with Flash Lite, the Flash for mobile, now’s your chance. Adobe is bribing you with $100.000 to write a killer application for their mobile platform. The Flash Lite Developer Challenge will award 6 applications in 6 categories with $15.000 and pick one overall winner that gets [...]
If I’d like to learn something new, certainly some new technology, I always like to learn by example. Having a goal to create something specific is, for me, much more motivating than leaving through a book one page at a time. photo credit: dudutorres For instance, Timo has a nice example of Papervision 3D and [...]
In this final installment of my tutorial on YouTube hacking, I’m going to show how to build the FLV URL for YouTube videos and start streaming the FLV in your ActionScript application. As you will notice, this is very little work, because it is based on the streaming example in the AS3 language reference. I’m [...]
Connecting different webservices together could leave open the door to attacks on your privacy by malicious individuals. This post goes into how Flash protects you from this, but still leaves open possibilities to tie together interesting mashups. I also explain how this fits in the large picture of our YouTube project and give an example. [...]
I’m sorry for the hyperbole in the title, but it really is something YouTube is very hush-hush about. In spite of that, direct access to the Flash Video file of YouTube movies gives you a very powerful tool. You have total control over: when, how and where you play the video. A recap of the [...]
While this post is only cursory related to using YouTube, it is important knowledge if you want to create fullscreen Flash applets and/or make sure they resize properly. So I have made it part of the series. In this post I’ll explain the StageScaleMode, which is a property that sometimes causes, what appears to be, [...]