Visit Elliot Smith cover art on street view

Fans will recognize the cover of Figure 8, a street mural in L.A.

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SelectiveBitmapDraw classes: draw just specific child objects or DisplayObject3D’s to a bitmap.

Sometimes you need a Bitmap to capture nested containers from a flat top-down perspective, but you're really just interested in drawing one or more of the nested objects and not others. This utility works by quickly toggling the visibility of other children off, then restoring it after draw(). Use a SelectiveBitmapDraw instance with the standard display list or a SelectiveBitmapDraw3D instance to capture specific nested DisplayObject3D's in a PaperVision3D scene.

Available here: http://www.mosessupposes.com/utilities

Posted in as3, digital | 3 Comments »

GoASAP & Fuse featured in Open Source Flash book

Because Flash is a proprietary plug-in technology and its coding language evolved gradually over about a decade, it took a while before the words Open Source meant anything to its developer pool. But when it hit, it hit hard: Aral Balkan's seminal site OSFlash introduced an already-thriving community to a whole new world of licensing code for the purpose of free and easy sharing, modification and reuse. Open Source took off in the Flash world and some of the most powerful software ever produced for the Flash Player is available for free, such as the incredible Red5 media server and the mighty PaperVision3D.

Friends of Ed is now giving you the chance to catch up on this little revolution with their new book, The Essential Guide to Open Source Flash Development, and I'm proud to say that I'm one of the contributing authors! My chapter covers several Open Source animation tools that I've released for ActionScript 2.0 and 3.0.

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Green-leaning startup from two original creators of Flash

If you've ever read up on the history of Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash [2] [3:video], you're probably familiar with the names Jonathan Gay and Robert Tatsumi.

Their latest startup venture is called greenbox, an "interactive energy management platform that enables households to save money and reduce their carbon footprint." The venture is backed in part by former Macromedia CFO Betsey Nelson and CEO Rob Burgess.

Earth2Tech blog: Greenbox: Flash Creators Tackle Energy in the Home
Wired.com: Flash Creators Reveal App for Saving Money on Energy

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Processingjs: Processing in JavaScript!

What a cool idea! John Resig has successfully ported the Java Processing API to JavaScript. Expect to see a lot more Flash-like effects on HTML web pages in the near future!

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MosesSupposes @ FWA

I'm honored to have gotten a 'Silhouette' writeup at Favorite Website Awards. Number 3, right after Yugo! Now that's an honor. The article talks about Fuse and GoASAP and then goes into some crazy hilarious sermon or something. Hehe.

http://www.thefwa.com/

Click: Featured > Silhouette #2 Moses Gunesch (april 9th)
[plaintext version of the article here.]

Thanks Craig & FWA!

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Hilarious spoofs: Why Flash? Why Flex? and Why AJAX? from Phil Kerman

You might have seen Adobe's latest YouTube marketing stunt, where their people give impromptu rants on "why flash" "why air" and so forth.

I guess you can't put anything up these days without expecting a parody to crop up within mere seconds. Well it looks like the latest Weird Al of the WWW is the Flash world's own notable author Phillip Kerman. Here's Phil's YouTube takes on:

Why Flash?, Why Flex?, and a hilarious counter-spoof of his own parody, Why AJAX?

Posted in digital | 1 Comment »

InteractivePNG

Like magic, transparent parts of a PNG in your MovieClip are ignored during mouse interactions. Check it out!

Normally the clear areas of a PNG are treated as solid, which can be especially frustrating when dealing with a lot of images that overlap each other because they tend to block mouse interactions on the clips below them.

This utility fixes that so that mouse events don't occur until you bump against a solid pixel, or a pixel of any transparency value besides totally clear. InteractivePNG lets you set an alphaTolerance level to determine what transparency level will register as a hit.

This was surprisingly tricky to write, so I'm releasing it open source in hopes that it helps someone out there.

Source and Documentation here

I chose not to use a mask, because that would mean managing the displaylist outside the movieclip, I wanted this to work for any freestanding movieclip without any complicated management within the program. I've also heard of people creating an overlay bitmap with all the parts and running hit detection on that, but that is a little clunky – it adds filesize and makes it hard to update your layout.

I know it looks extremely simple, but if you're curious, here's what goes into it. First I detect & suppress mouse interactions at which time I toggle the clip's mouseEnabled flag off, and use an ENTER_FRAME event to detect when the mouse bumps into the edge of the image and reenable the mouse, toggling it off again during roll out. It uses the native method BitmpaData.hitTest. Finally when the mouse leaves the bounds of the movieclip, the tracking is turned off and the system is reset to listen for the mouse to knock again. It was particularly tricky to keep the cursor hand from flickering when the edge of the image is passed when buttonMode is turned on, which is done by temporarily caching that property on the initial round of suppressed events. Like I said, it looks simple, but...!

Posted in as3, digital | 18 Comments »

The story of stuff

This website is great, really informative and a fantastic use of Flash technology to communicate a non-advertising message (too rare these days). It describes some pretty horrifying facts about our consumer system and its impact on the real world in a simple, fun animated format.

www.storyofstuff.com

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Go is now available to the public

Official site with other links: www.goasap.org. Please join the mailing list so you can stay up to date, the code base is still very raw and will be updated actively.

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