Flash Player 10 released

Hiddentrak | Flash | Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

So Flash Player 10 has been released this morning and I’m sure there are a million posts/examples about all the new features. I think a small thing that is great from a designer’s point of view is the addition of ligatures into the text handling. These can add that extra level of detail that when used properly can make a design stand out.

POOLS

Hiddentrak | Skateboard | Saturday, July 19th, 2008

Pool Skating
I’m working on a pretty big project and that meant coming in this weekend. While I was wrapping up the day I saw this link to SLAP’s site about pool skating and wanted to share it. Reminded me of how fun the Asbury Pool was and just how fun skateboarding is in general.

Sk8face Trailer

Hiddentrak | Skateboard | Monday, July 14th, 2008

Sk8Face Trailer

Skateboard graphics are a constant source of creative inspiration. This seems to be an interesting documentary about the history and progression of skateboard graphics. I’m not personally one to collect decks for the sake of collection, I would much rather skate one/break one and save it for the memory. Wish I had saved 1 of each of the decks I did but I think I had more fun on them.

Is it only art until someone wants it?

BlowUp Flickr

Hiddentrak | Flash | Monday, July 14th, 2008

BlowUp
Found this cool interface for Flickr by NYC design studio Bond Art + Science. Put up a demo of it for my photos and I really enjoy it. If you have some time head over to their website and also download the BlowUp files.

Processing experiment #1 - Shapesketcher

Hiddentrak | Experimental, Processing | Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

If you have any Processing experience, please look the other way on this post. This is a very simple test from someone with little Processing experience. I think the key thing to take away from this is how easy it is to get something going. If you are interested in learning more about Processing I’ve listed 10 great resources/inspirations that should definitely be checked out.

click to launch Shapesketcher

10 Great Processing Resources and Inspirations

Actionscript experiment #3 - Spectrum

Hiddentrak | Experimental, Flash | Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

Just having a little fun with some of the Sound features available in Flash. Download source.

Spectrum

* Remember you will need to modify the source to point at your .mp3 file since I could not distribute the song.

MLB Flex Chat

Hiddentrak | Flash | Sunday, June 15th, 2008

One of my last projects at MLB Advanced Media was a Jabber powered chat client built in Flex. The interface consists of mxml components, several custom Flex components (like the crowd view), and some Flash content converted over to Flex with the Flex Component Kit.

It uses the as3 XIFF library to communicate with eJabberd, and at the time I had to make some modifications to the library to get it to successfully work. This is due to eJabberd’s strict implementation of the xmpp spec. It basically meant using the binary socket and fixing some of the packet structures. There are also several services that the client interfaces with, including some “bots” that can log in and out of chat to administer it and perform other tasks.

MLB.com Flex Chat Stadium View

Using Regular Expressions in AS3

Hiddentrak | Flash | Sunday, June 15th, 2008

If you're programming experience is primarily based in the world of Flash, you may not have had much exposure to regular expressions. With it's inclusion in AS3, we now have some very powerful, and helpful tools available to us. I just wanted to post a quick snippet of how you might use regular expressions in your development.

Actionscript:
  1. //regex that finds and replaces tokens in a string
  2. function replaceTokens(str:String,paramObj:Object) : String{
  3.     //token structure ${tokenName}
  4.     var myRegEx:RegExp = /\$\{([a-zA-Z0-9]+)\}/g;
  5.     return str.replace(myRegEx,function(){return paramObj[arguments[1]]});
  6. }

The regular expression we are concerned with is:

Actionscript:
  1. var myRegEx:RegExp = /\$\{([a-zA-Z0-9]+)\}/g;

When this pattern is run against some input it matches the dollar sign, then an open brace, any letter or number and then a closing brace. Like so: ${exampleToken} The function we put together takes those matches and replaces the value with a match in the paramObj.

Actionscript experiment #1 - curveTo and trig

Hiddentrak | Experimental, Flash | Sunday, June 15th, 2008

I was just fooling around with the curveTo method of the drawing API and some simple trig.

Click here or on the image to see it in action. You can drag the boxes too.

curveTo fun!

Actionscript experiment #2 - Simple Recursion

Hiddentrak | Experimental, Flash | Sunday, June 15th, 2008

Recursion

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