I am not a blogger.
Yes, I know that blogging is apparently dead or in its dying throes. I always like to pick up trends long after they are hot — I expect to open a Twitter account by 2012. That is, of course, unless the world ends in an over-the-top Roland Emmerich sort of way.
I entitled this first entry “I am not a blogger” and I’ve long thought just that as I watched blogs come and go around me while I played with the idea of starting one of my own. I had a fairly active website at 27Bobs in the early days, but over the past several years I’ve updated it less and less — I think once every 8 months was the average in the end. I am certainly not a daily, weekly, or now even monthly updater, so having a blog just seemed silly for me.
So, why now? Well, first, I am finishing my fifth year at Brightcove in Cambridge, MA, working primarily on the user-facing front end for our service, the media players, along with the templating system for creating them and the Flex application for managing them. We do some pretty cool stuff in that area and there’s a lot of functionality in our players that just hasn’t been tapped yet or showcased. Hopefully with this forum I can provide some insight and answer questions for those currently developing.
I also saw my first full book, Foundation ActionScript 3.0 Image Effects, published this past Spring by friends of ED. I thought having a site that could support that book outside of the friends of ED forums would be helpful (if a little belated at this point). In that book, I present two open source libraries I wrote and use all the time, aeon animation and aether effects. I’d like to delve into these a bit more using this blog as well.
Finally, there is a rare occasion when I still get to do something in Flash just for fun and to experiment with features I might not get to explore much at Brightcove, and I will present those pieces here when I can. One example of this is AIRHead, a desktop bobblehead toy created for AIR using my custom UI, 3D, effects and animation libraries (you can see an image of one of the creations in my header above). I will be making this available for download shortly along with the slides and files from my presentation at RIA Unleashed where I spoke about ActionScript image manipulation and demonstrated AIRHead for the first time.
So we’ll see where this blog thing goes. Stay tuned.
I attended your presentation at RIA Unleashed. Is your bobble head on your website somewhere?
I am cleaning up the slides and sample files so that they can be more easily packaged and perused. With that I will include the AIRHead installer. I’ll follow up in a couple days with more details on the application, hopefully including some instructional video.
I have traveled through time to find you and torment you with questions from the past: In your Extending Flash MX 2004 chapter on XMLUI, how do you access the selection of xmlui targetlist ? I couldn’t find that anywhere in the book.
I know…it’s 2009, but hey…I’m old school too ;)
It’s been a LONG time since I used that functionality in Flash, honestly — if I write JSFL it is generally for a command without any UI. However, flipping through the Behaviors chapter (wow, those proved useful, didn’t they :)), like on page 220, it looks like you need to define a property that is the same id as your targetlist, then you can access it through xmlui.get(propertyName).
Damn! I skipped the whole Behaviors chapter because I thought I’ll never need it. I can now access the selected value just using the id of the target list. Thank you!
Regarding “Actionscript 3.0 Image Effects”: I only have Flash CS3 so I am wondering how much of the book would be unusable?
Much thanks!
The chapters on Pixel Bender and 3D deal with features available in Flash Player 10, so unless you can compile for that those would not be useful (except maybe to encourage you to upgrade!). That is also true for most of the drawing API chapter — there is review of all the drawing API, but half of the chapter details the new API.
The filters and blend modes and BitmapData chapters are just as applicable for FP9 and Flash CS3. The open source libraries I present for animation and effects creation (and the chapter that covers them) can be used with CS3, though there is a certain small amount of the effects code you would not be able to utilize, like that dealing with shaders. The same holds true for the last several chapters of the book that present different finished effect projects. I just flipped through them and for the most part they all would work with CS3 except for a few that have 3D and shader code, but that is only a few out of over a dozen.
So, I would say that perhaps around 65% of the book would be just as usable with CS3. I would also add, though, that you can also work through the rest of the book either using the command line compiler or a free IDE like FlashDevelop in order to experiment with and build for FP10.
Hi Todd,
I ran across you PenPad component and wanted to know if it was okay for me to use and to try and port to actionscript 3? It’s really great!
Please let me know if that is okay.
Josh
I actually have had several requests recently to update this for AS3 for some commercial projects, and my hope is now to make this into a customizable component that could be purchased inexpensively for anyone’s use.
I don’t honestly recall whether I provided the code in any of my original downloads, but if I did I have no problem if you want to use and modify this for your own personal projects, but would appreciate if the code was not resold in any way.
Thanks Tyard…. the code was included in the original download, and to be honest, while I was waiting for your response, I updated it to as3 in a personal air app I’m working on. Added a text field deal too, and now I’m trying to get “stencils” or “movieclips” implemented so you can save pieces of graphics for reuse. I can send you all the code if you would like and maybe we could work together or open source it and get working with svg as the markup language….
I had an SVG export in there at one point. Was that in the original download? I can send that to you (if I can find it…).
As I was looking at the code this weekend I recalled that I had updated it to AS2 several years ago for a shared whiteboard app that included text entry. I’ll probably start from that since I had already cleaned it up quite a bit, addressed some bugs and moved more toward a more traditional OOP model.
You moved pretty fast!
no, the svg export was not in there, but that would be awesome if I could get that. I moved fast because you put together some really great stuff. Clean and easy to follow. So, that’s all you:) I’ll strip out what I’ve got in this app and send to you if you want. If so, just let me know where you’d like me to send it.
Hope I’m not bugging you here, but was wondering if you had given any thought to stencils. I’m thinking that I create a new shapeHolder for each saved stencil and then have an array of shapes, shapeHolders, selectedShapes, etc, that hold the main drawing and all the loaded stencils. Then have a currentShapeHolder, currentSelectedShapes etc, that would be one of the entries in the arrays I just described. So, I’m writing a custom MC for the shapeholder that has stuff like translation, x, y, master (true = document , false = stencil), selected, etc. I know that was about as nebulous a description of that direction that I’m headed but if you can make heads or tails of what I’m trying to say, then does that seem to be the right thought process to you?
I know for the whiteboard app we had a feature where you could insert into the whiteboard bitmap images, and in that case I believe I just represented these as Shapes as well. I think everything rendered, even the text, was a Shape, or implemented a common Shape-like interface, but then the child classes were DrawingShape, TextShape, BitmapShape, etc. (I don’t think I used “Shape”, but you get the idea). The canvas just always saw a collection of shapes and didn’t care how they implemented the positioning and transform methods.
For stencils, I would probably just take the image — whether it came from a bitmap, movieclip symbol, etc. — and just transform it into bitmap data. Then, even if was vector, you could allow things like skewing and envelope transforms pretty easily.
I found the SVG code. It’s just a single method really that ran through the shapes array and wrote out the XML. You can email at tyard@27bobs.com and I can send it to you.