I’ve had quite a few questions about how to make depth in flash. Earlier (like, 2 years ago) I put up an experiment file to give some interactive depth to some sketchbook sketches, see Floating Sketches. I’ve finally gotten around to translating that into as3. It’s still the same basic idea, Create layers of levels, [...]
I’ve had that exact task numerous time while scripting actionscript. I have a source image loaded externally or a mc within the program and I need to fit it into a certain area (width x height) but keep the aspect ratio the same or as photoshop calls it “constrain proportions”. I’ve done this with fancy [...]
Overview Earlier I wrote a tutorial article about asfunction in as2. Now that I’ m into as3, surprise surprise asfunction has been depreciated and now to replace it is the LINK TextEvent. Dispatched when a user clicks a hyperlink in an HTML-enabled text field, where the URL begins with “event:”. The remainder of the URL [...]
Rich Shupe and Zevan Rosser’s Learning ActionScript 3.0: A Beginner’s Guide. This book is published by O’Reilly and is part of the Adobe Developer Library. This book was a great way for me to move into as3. I’m coming from a visual design background with little formal programming training, to know more of my background [...]
See my previous post about how to do this with as2: Detect Flash Player Version | Actionscript based detection method (as2) Overview Recently I had a requirement that I had to detect which version of the flash player was currently installed. This is a normal thing, we do it all the time when embedding flash [...]
Overview Integrating the clipboard of the operating system with your flash projects is sometimes essential. It’s a very simple and boils down to one basic method… System.setClipboard(). I’ve found a couple other things help the user experience though, such as selecting the text that gets copied and giving the user some sort of feedback to [...]
To accompany the last presidential debate, I ask a question: Who to vote for? It’s not just about what party you’re affiliated with, who you agree with more on an issue or which candidate you understand better… it’s a combination of them all. It’s more important how a candidate can handle the different issues facing [...]
Overview Allowing users to use the keyboard as well as the mouse is a great way to incite interaction with your flash. This tutorial will show how to code it and what you can do with some keyboard events. This changed with actionscript 3, note this tutorial is AS3. altKeY (Boolean) Indicates whether the Alt [...]
Ryan has announced a contest to investigate how Google is actually crawling swfs. He introduced the term “fleximagically searchable” to be included in external content, which is then loaded into the Flex swf. Hoping that google will read the external source file through the swf. Also testing how this shows up in the search results. [...]
Overview: Often I’ve had some dynamically created movieclip and then wanted to reference it in my code. This is hard to do if it is named dynamically as well, such as with an incrementing variable. If you use one (or more) variable to name an instance in run time, you can’t always know what it [...]
Synth Emulator on Google Japan Doodle Today Embedded Link Moog 自分のオリジナル曲を創って、 #moogdoodle で共有しよう。
New additions to the plugin directory include: favorites, incorporating support forums into it's own tab for each plugin as well as support stats being displayed! Great! I think we also need the ability to give plugins ratings and reviews (bonus points if it can be done from within a wordpress admin dashboard when installing plugins). [...]
Use zipf's short head to tune your website rather than redesign the whole thing. To make a website successful it needs to meet the needs of the users. Find out what those needs are by using the short head philosophy to equate most searched things as the biggest needs of the users. Use personas to [...]
Great article at a list apart discusing the state of the industry regarding responsive images. This picks apart the set attribute of the img element from a surprisingly objective view coming from someone so close to the picture element. Insightful discussion about the principle behind the proposals than the actual solution too. If the working [...]
A great developer story about the differences on what Git is vs other version control and what Git is not. This is how we should learn it. I heard over and over that it was distributed, but never grasped what that meant, so here are a few links and explanations that will help unlearn version [...]
I'm very excited to share the news that the tween library from GreenSock (hands down the best tweening library I used in flash) is not ported for use in javascript! This will be great! I missed that simple syntax from as3 when animating javascript, and now I can have my cake and eat it too. [...]
Here are a few useful css tricks to remember when building responsive design sites from web designer wall Embedded Link 5 Useful CSS Tricks for Responsive Design Making the design to be responsive is very easy as shown in my Responsive Design in 3 Steps tutorial, but maintaining the elements to look aesthetically balanced on [...]
Bruce details the reasons and story behind the srcset attribute which is now introduced as an alternative to the picture element. Some aspects of the attribute are nice (like the fact that it's an attribute and not a new element, so it's creating up new elements with for problems. It's adapting currently used elements to [...]
Here's a very creative use of using a newly available technology. Using svg graphics which are very lightweight, for a website preloader. I like the animation used as well. Embedded Link Make a stylish preloader with SVG | Tutorial | .net magazine Many sites neglect users with slow connections. Ian Culshaw explains how to use [...]
I'm Evan Mullins. I'm a web designer and am very interested in the intersection of art & technology, user experience, and interactive design. I like contributing to make the web incrementally a better place. I love simultaneously solving problems & making things aesthetically brilliant. circlecube is my interactive design site chock full of tutorials, critiques, techniques, technologies, ramblings and a playground of experiments. Welcome to it!
Bruce Brownlee