FlashGoddess application dealine Extended

It's not too late to apply for the FlashGoddess award. The deadline's been extended to March 23rd. So get in there and show your work! You know you deserve an award!

Do you have a female colleague who you think should apply? Be sure to encourage her so! Let her know you think she's up to the challenge. Many women may shy away from competition and public acknowledgment, no matter how talented they are.

Visit the FlashGoddess Award Program site, for more information.

jellies2b

jellies2b
Originally uploaded by galaxygoo1

Just updated this piece to AS3. Source code is available for download.

FlashForward Comes Home

In an email to speakers, Lynda Weinman writes

The next Flashforward Conference and Film Festival will be held August 20-22 in San Francisco; the location will be announced soon.

It seems that Lynda has passed the orange arrow to Beau Ambur (of Metaliq), who is now running the show. I'm very curious to see how he shapes the conference, and of course I'm thrilled that it's come back to San Francisco. I won't have an excuse if I miss it this year. Don't know if I'll speak this time, but I'll certainly come to the show :-)

Migration from AS2 to AS3: Alpha values

If you've been migrating legacy code to AS3 for a while, this is very old news.

Migrating old code from AS2 to AS3, can be an adventure in tedium. It's easy to spot "._x" and convert to ".x", and replace "createEmptyMovieClip" with new MovieClip, but less obvious to spot are the alpha values.

In AS2, you could write

b._alpha = 40;

And this would set the alpha of clip "b" at 40 percent.

To do this in AS3, you need to write

b.alpha = .4;

because, in AS3 100 percent is indicated as 1.

It's especially easy to miss, at first go, if you're migrating a color transformation. Here's an example of a transformation I was migrating today.

In AS2, it looked like this:

var b3 = targ.createEmptyMovieClip("bubble3", targ.getNextHighestDepth());

var fillType = "radial"
var colors = [0xFF0000, 0x0000FF];
var alphas = [20, 20];
var ratios = [10, 200];
var spreadMethod = "reflect";
var interpolationMethod = "RGB";
var focalPointRatio = 0.1;
var matrix = new Matrix();
matrix.createGradientBox(100, 100, 0, 0, 0);

b3.beginGradientFill(fillType, colors, alphas, ratios, matrix, spreadMethod, interpolationMethod, focalPointRatio);

. . .

In the AS3 vesrion, there are a several changes. It would be easy to miss the change in scale for the values held in the array "alphas".

var b3 = new Sprite();

var fillType = "radial"
var colors = [0xFF0000, 0x0000FF];
var alphas = [.2, .2];
var ratios = [10, 200];
var spreadMethod = "reflect";
var interpolationMethod = "RGB";
var focalPointRatio = 0.1;
var matrix = new Matrix();
matrix.createGradientBox(100, 100, 0, 0, 0);

b3.graphics.beginGradientFill(fillType, colors, alphas, ratios, matrix, spreadMethod, interpolationMethod, focalPointRatio);

. . .

this.addChild(b3);

Oh, and don't forget to add your new display object. I'm sure there are other things I've missed, but this covers the new display model in AS3 and the alpha values.

The 2008 FlashGoddess Award

I'm honored to join the judging panel for the 2008 FlashGoddess Award. If you, or anyone you know, is eligible for the award...hurry up and apply! The application deadline is Midnight, March 15th.

slideshow coded in AS2

slideshowAS2
Originally uploaded by galaxygoo1

I dug out this slide show today, for a current project, and thought I'd share it. It's coded in AS2, for flash player 8+, and loads an external XML file for image files path and information.

I've included source files for download. Code is all on the first frame of the timeline.

Added an old project to my lab today. I've always meant to go back and work on this one more, but kept getting distracted by work. That's the problem with personal projects, they usually have to take the back seat in life.

giving flowers

Back in the 80's, the loss of so many neighbors and friends led me to write a rather morbid song. The chorus went like this

mother always said
don't wait until I'm dead
you might as well save
a trip to my grave, and
give me my flowers now.

It was cheesy, but what can I say? I was very young, and overwhelmed by seeing so much suffering. It was still fairly early in the AIDS epidemic, and we were hit very hard here in San Francisco.

Anyway...since those days, when people in my life pass away, I feel compelled to tell those around me how wonderful they are.

The only problem is that it's hard to do that without seeming weird sometimes.

underground-lab goes live

It's still very rough, but here's the link to my underground lab. This is just a starter, I'll be adding more pieces as I work through my personal archives. More detailed notes are in the works.

I'll also be adding source files, eventually. With older pieces, I may just update them and release those source files instead of the originals. Flash may be ubiquitous, but it's not always backwards compatible.

Over the years, I've been pretty shy about sharing a lot of my personal projects. I'm hoping this lab will help me to overcome that. It will be my own archive, that I just happen to share.

my underground lab

I've been working on a space to keep my experiments and other works, and I gotta tell you...it's a lot more fun to make these things than it is to get them organized and documented (even minimally so).

Digging through my old files, even those from the last few months, has been a lot of fun. Been rediscovering old projects that got lost in my excitement over some new idea or the need to focus on a client project.

My mind is usually swimming with ideas, and there are times when it's like a fireworks show in my head with ideas bursting out and sparkling brightly. I try to jot them down in some way, before they fade away...or worse, distract me from a task I absolutely must focus on.

What's the point of this rambling post? Well, I'm trying to say that I'll be publishing some of these sketches and code experiments on a companion site to this blog. Stay tuned for details.

smarter

"I feel smarter, just standing in here"....this is one of my favorite things anyone has ever said in my office.