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!

Posted in digital, js, processing | No Comments »

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 | 28 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.

Posted in as3 | No Comments »

Using FZip on the Mac

FZip is a smashing new utility that allows you to load zipfiles into SWFs at runtime, accessing each file as the archive progressively loads. The official page is here but the latest versions are often found at Claus Wahlers' blog.

My trouble with it was that archives created by Mac OSX are incompatible with it, and will make FZip throw an error, “Data descriptors are not supported.” The other trouble is that I'm not a command-line geek so it took me a while to figure out how to zip a file, then apply the included Python-based patch. Hopefully someone with real OSX skills will create some little app that batches these processes, they're a real pain but at least we Mac users can now stream ZIP files... Woohoo!

WordPress is erroring out every time I try and post this information but it can be found in this comment.

Posted in as3, digital | 1 Comment »

Fuse makes someone’s top 10 :)

I missed this March post from Tuesday Creative that puts Fuse in very impressive company, alongside great Open Source Flash projects like XRay, ASUnit, ActionStep and more. When it comes to handing Fuse the #1 slot, the wise words of The Dude seem fitting: "Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man." (Especially when it comes to including Eclipse on this list, which is really in an echelon of its own.) But it's an honor to even be thought of in the same league as these other ActionScript heavies, so thanks kindly Tuesday, this made my day!

The most robust and efficient AS 2.0 tween engine in the world, an animation sequencer with highly compact, legible syntax... Were this list broken down by types of merit, this project would be near the top for technical achievement, application in the real world, and number one for usability and practicality. I honestly don’t know how I ever lived without Fuse.

View the post
Note: their link to the Fuse site is broken, here's a working one.

Posted in Fuse 2, digital | No Comments »

Now featuring great Fused websites

I've started a new feature at the Fuse website called "Featured Fuser".

Honors currently go to NAWLZ, an incredible interactive comic book, built with Fuse!

Check it out! http://www.mosessupposes.com/Fuse/

Posted in Fuse 2, digital | No Comments »

OFFF New York: Viva Barcelona!

Barcelona's long-running OFFF festival for cutting-edge digital art and culture finally touched down in New York this year, taking over a good portion of Borough of Manhattan Community College's campus in lower TRIBECA. This fest featured a good swath of their usual top-shelf speakers, and a growing lineup of digitally-infused performance art pieces.

OFFF has become a very diverse and well-balanced show. The list starts with Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in digital | 2 Comments »