Good Flash programmers are not easy to find, with many companies scrambling to find their own Actionscript virtuosos. This makes us even happier about the first-rate talents that we have secured in our team. As one can never be 100% prepared for what the future holds, we are always watching out for fresh talents in this field.

We have kept SwitchOn(Training) as our little secret when it comes to sourcing good Flash programmers, but have now decided to let the world know about this excellent establishment! SwitchOn(Training) is a Flash and Actionscript school in Cape Town that is dedicated and passionate about improving the quality of Flash training in the local Flash community.

As we are located in Cape Town, it has always been easy to convince programmers from around the world to move here to be part of our dynamic team. That said, we really do appreciate the local development and are looking forward to seeing many talented graduates!

Welcome to Ben-Piet, the newest edition to the GSDH programming team.

Ben was born in Namibia (one can mention here proudly, that he played tennis in the Namibian national team – yes, they do have one there!) and studied Mathematical Science at the CTI in Durbanville.
Native Namibians understand that on a sunny day, there is nothing on earth that can beat a good braai (barbecue), Rugby, and of course Cricket. Therefore Ben was highly motivated to develop a system that helps cricket clubs in the Western Cape to capture a player’s complete data. This tool enabled the clubs to manage their teams, give them an overview of the player’s stats, as well as the results of the matches played.

His following project was not less challenging: a Career Management tool for the FNB bank, which captures the performance of about 25.000 employees.

Ben is now looking forward to more creative Flash projects at GSDH, and we are looking forward to this addition to our international team (our Friday-after-work-braais stand to benefit from this too!).

Whether you’re in Koblenz, New York, Geneva or Hongkong -TRAFFIC Communications’ home is all over the world. That´s why we used a TRAFFIC skyline as the theme for the recent revamp of the internet presence of this successful full-service advertising agency. The dynamic flash application displays the showcase of clients, projects and campaigns in a slick, clean and modern look - which is liked all over the world!

see www.TRAFFIC-communications.de skyline

GSDH was approached by Kochan & Partner, Munich, to realize an informative website for FH Coburg, university of applied sciences. The central theme behind the website is to make students feel at home, so all information is displayed through handy magazines which are placed on a typical student desk.
Kochan & Partner’s innovative graphics, in combination with our Flash know-how, resulted in an imaginative, easy to navigate and informative website. Click here to visit the site.

With almost 340.000(!) visitors in German theaters during the first 4 days, the new Jason Statham Action movie Crank2 - for which we produced the official website and the online banner campaign - impressively and unerringly jumped to number 1 on the German theatre charts! This makes Crank2 the most successful of all Jason Statham’s forerunner movies (Crank, Transporter 1-3) for the first weekend showing…

The official movie site for Crank 2 is online. The site presents appealing design, interesting features, sophisticated concepts and user-friendly applications. The user will be provided with a lot of exciting content by means of a trailer and story information as well as downloadable goodies and an online lottery. Moreover, you are able to enter the world of the movie by means of a gallery, information about cast / crew and behind the scenes info. As expected Crank 2 is jam packed with action and a “must” for all action movie fans, who want to watch Chev Chelios on his path between life and death.

Universum Film GmbH came up with a sensational product in Crank 2. GSDH received a challenging brief to design, conceptualize and create the official Crank 2 movie site. We would like to thank Universum Film GmbH for the great collaboration and we are looking forward to working on new and exciting projects with them.

Check out www.crank2-derfilm.de

GSDH created a high quality website for the Bay Consulting Crew, a company which specializes in the fields of auditing and legal advice.

The design draws parallels between the challenging sport of sailing and the company’s values and ethics.

Sailing is a discipline based on, precision and teamwork, where highest professionalism with regard to concentration, communication and execution is required, especially during turbulent and challenging times.

Likewise, the Bay Consulting Crew is characterized by all of the mentioned skills and is thus able to serve clients on the highest level.

GSDH received the exciting order to implement these skills within one website and has been able to pilot the ship safely into the harbor…

The eggs within Bernbacher’s egg noodles are only laid by happy bavarian outdoor chicken. That does not only taste better but shows again that Bernbacher’s noodles are of top quality - like our microsite, www.gsdh.org/Bernbacher which has been created with regard to Bernbacher’s campaign. A ringtone with the bavarian “Defiliermarsch” of cackling chicken is also provided…

The tough gangster and killer Chev Chelios is back, and is now in need of electricity to keep his new artificial heart beating. His real heart has been stolen by triad mugger Johnny Vang. Vang wants to use Chev’s heart to vitalize triad boss Hu Dong’s life. Slowly but surely, Chev is running out of time…

GSDH received the exciting task to create the official movie site and already provides a teaser site of the movie until the official site is launched…

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Im Auftrag der Agentur Plan.net haben wir für den Kunden ADAC ein Flash Framework für das Park’n’Race Online Gewinnspiel programmiert.

Die Herausforderung bestand darin, streaming Video Sequences, Sound, 3D-Spiele, ein grafisch anspruchsvolles User Interface und eine Datenbank unter einen Hut zu bringen.

Das Spiel richtet sich an die Abonnenten der Zeitschrift ADACmotorwelt und bietet neben Spannung und Action, die Möglichkeit einen grossartigen Preis abzustauben.

Das Ergebnis ist ein aufregendes Spielerlebnis, das unter http://www.motorwelt-park-n-race.de zu finden ist.

“Tour de Flex is a desktop application for exploring Flex capabilities and resources, including the core Flex components, Adobe AIR and data integration, as well as a variety of third-party components, effects, skins, and more.

• Provide non-Flex developers with a good overview of what is possible in Flex in a “look and see” environment
  
• Provide Flex developers with an illustrated reference tool
  
• Provide commercial and non-commercial Flex developers a place to showcase their work

Tour de Flex includes over 200 runnable samples, each with source code, links to documentation, and other details. Topics include the Flex Core Components, Flex Data Access, AIR Desktop Capabilities, Cloud APIs, Data Visualization, Mapping, and a growing collection of custom components, effects, skins, etc.”

Check it out here: http://flex.org/tour

Its always nice to get good feedback, especially from people who know what they are talking about… Manfred Weber is a Flash developer in Munich and always has quite good thoughts and ideas in regards to Flash and Flex. So if you are interested in ActionScript and the newest developments add his blog to your listof must-reads…

Manfred’s feedback, cheers Manfred

Harald Linsenmeier, an exceptional copywriter and creative director, approached GSDH to code his online showcase. The award winning work diplayed include video and print ads for big names like Audi, Opel and Coca Cola…

Check out www.hlfreelance.de

The long wait is over! GSDH has just launched the Flash website for the very successful celebrity and fashion photographer Ugo Richard.
It was such a pleasure to work with Ugo Richard, and we at GSDH had a lot of fun working on this project. Ugo is extremely happy with his new presence on the web, stating that the website measures up to the same high standard as his work.

Click here to see the site.

On Tusday the 19th of Auguth the new Flex User Group Munich is gathering for the first time. We are meeting at Master’s Home for a beer or two. If you are interested, come join us…

Looking forward to meet everyone for the first time!

The whole world is desperately looking for flashers and GSDH now has one more of them.

Chris relies on not less than 15 years of work experience. As an art director for several big agencies in Cologne you can’t beat his knowledge of print and web design.

But after a while everything static becomes boring. That is why Chris decided to not only play around with Flash but to turn it into the main focus of his career. Thanks a lot for this wise decision! It can not get dynamic enough for Chris, but luckily the possibilities in Flash are endless in this regard…

Chris’ drive to the new and unknown recently inspired him to grab his wife and dogs in Germany to look for a new challenge in Cape Town. Or maybe it was the mountain that was calling him, because when he isn’t programming you will find Chris climbing it…

Still a really difficult thing with the FlexBuilder 3 IDE is to embed any installed font. I really broke my head when i searched a easy way to do this. Well, i didnt found a really simple way to do it, but i found one that is nearly comfortable. In this small tutorial i will explain a way to embed fonts with a little help from the Flash CS3 IDE.

First of all, open the Flash CS3 IDE and create a MovieClip. Inside this MovieClip generate a dynamic Textfield and set the font to whatever you want to use later on in FlexBuilder. If you want to embed several fonts just insert more TextFields and set the font you want to use later on. Now activate the “Export for ActionScript” Checkbox in the Librarys Linkage and keep the class-name in mind. Generate the SWF now and can switch to the Flex IDE.

Right before the Main-Class-Definition you have to insert the precompiler-instruction

[Embed(source="name_of_swf.swf#Fonts")]

Directly after the Class-Definition you have to link the Class of the just generated SWF to a Flex-Class-Object:

private var Fonts:Class;

Now you can simply use the Fonts you embeded in the Flash CS3 IDE MovieClip.
Small example:

var myTextField:TextField = new TextField();
/**
 * args
**/
myTextField.defaultTextFormat = new TextFormat("Arial");

Finished…

This is quite nifty:

“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.”

http://blog.mosessupposes.com/?p=40

Check out CamSpace a software agent that can track objects in real-time using any standard webcam! The software will be for free any anybody can develop games for it and share them over the internet. Time to play…

Developed by CamTrax Technologies
First seen on Fabian Nöthe’s Blog (German)

For whoever doesn’t know about it yet:

Alternativa platform has launched!

Announcement on their blog.

GSDH designed and developed a completelly dynamic XML and ActionScript 3 driven Flex application for Kneipp.

The application is a tool that allows users to pick a certain health-indication group (e.g. pregnancy) via a intuitive & innovative navigational concept. In a next step the visitor can pick the most important vitamins and minerals within this indcation group and learns about nutritional facts and Kneipp products which will supplement in that particular field.

The development of the tool was real fun and the tool itself turned out really well!

Check out the “Nutritional Circle” here

Philips Medizin Systeme GmbH (the German division of PHILIPS Healthcare) asked us to design and develop a Flash game for their intranet. The game is a camel race where all sales people race each other based on each person’s daily order intake and it will be used as a inHouse motivational tool.

The game was developed in ActionScript 3, Adobe Flex, Flash CS3 and Adobe Illustrator.

We love Flash game development, AS3 and design and the game turned out to be quite fun…

Check it out here (all content, names and numbers are dummy content)

Found this great little example on manipulating sound data with Flash 9. This makes it a whole lot easier for Flashdevelopers to manipulate sound in Flash. I see some very interesting projects being created with this in future.

http://theflashblog.com/?p=181#

Most of you will probably know this Flash / AS3 3D physics engine already but I thought I’d share it for the Flashprogrammer who likes 3D and doesn’t yet…

From the site:

“WOW-Engine is a free AS3 physics engine by Seraf ( Jérôme Birembaut ) capable to handle positions in a 3D environmentand it is open source.

WOW-Engine uses the Sandy library for the 3D mathematical computations (matrix, 3D vector, plane). The inner architecture of the engine is also inspired by Sandy’s one.

Collisions and physical reactions are possible thanks to the AS3 physic engine made by Alec Cove, named APE (version 0.2.). APE is a 2D physic engine, it is possible to extend the contraints on volumes, and that’s the purpose of WOW-engine. WOW-engine extends APE, and allows to simulate physics on 3D volumes.

WOW-Engine is capable to handle positions and rotations of abstract objects, which need to be linked to some visual objects (2D or 3D). The visual objects can be drawn thanks to another library (Sandy3D , Papervision3D, Away3D for 3D).

WOW-Engine uses and depends of the Data Structures classes written by polygonal labs.“

Click here to read more, check cases and further development

For my actual project (a Camel Race for Philips) i had to search for a function which translates a flash.utils.date object into a calendar-week int. After a while of searching i found a coole one and i translated it into AS3. Maybe someone can use this one

function getCW(target:Date):int {
	var a = target.getFullYear();
	var m = target.getMonth()+1;
	var j = target.getDate();
	var S = Math.floor(a/100);
	var A = a%100;
	var aB = (a%4 == 0 && a%100 != 0) || (a%1000 == 0) ? 1 : 0;
	var jNA = (5*S+Math.floor(S/4)+A+Math.floor(A/4)+aB*6)%7;
	var w = Math.floor((jNA+(m == 1 ? j : m == 2 ? 31+j : Math.floor((30.6*m)-32.3)+j+aB*1)+5)/7)-Math.floor(jNA/5);
	return w == 0 || w == 53?1:w;
}

For my last Project i had to send some variables from my Flash-app via AS3 to a PHP script, this script handles the next Steps of processing. (Unfortunately) I had to search for a solution which not produces a PopUp Window (critical because of the PopUp-blockers) for a long time. The AS3 function flash.net.sendToUrl() produces mystical error messages at compile-time.

However, i stared to use the load() method from the URLLoader Class as seen in the below-mentioned snippet. With this method you can send data to PHP scripts and the user doesnt recognize it. But be aware: the data will be send via HTTP-GET, that means that you shouldnt use it to send critical data (such as passworts, credit-card details). Within the PHP script you can get the Data with the $_GET[] array (in the snippet the vars myname and email).

Another advantage is that you can get result-variables from your PHP script (e.g. status-messages). For this you have to add an EventListener to the URLLoader-Object, you can access the data through the Event-Object in the EventHandler.

Code-Snippet:

function sendData():void{
var myrequest:URLRequest = new URLRequest("send.php"); //create a URLRequest Object and
var variables:URLVariables = new URLVariables;         //the name of the PHP-script
var myPhpLoader:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
variables.myname = outro.name.text; //content of a textfield
variables.email = outro.email_adresse.text; //content of a textfield
myrequest.data = variables;
myrequest.method = URLRequestMethod.GET; //via HTTP-GET
myPhpLoader.load(myrequest); //send
}

TweenFilterLite (AS3 Version) - Easily Tween Filters & Image Effects

I found a new Tweenig Class called “TweenFilterLite” as i searched for a way to animate TextField.
Till now i used the Tweener Class which can be found at the GoogleCode page. But this class can only animate Sprites, if you want to animate a TextField, the app crashes at runtime.

The concept of TweenFilterLite is different. With this class you can animate any kind of displayable objects. And so the main advantage (in my opinion) is that you can animate every child of DisplayObject without nesting it in a Sprite or a MovieClip etc.

A another advantage is that you can place several animation types (blur, fade, glow etc) in a queue and the class runs it one after the other. That means that you dont have to write onComplete functions for every animation (reduces code size and improves readability).

The Class has a very good documentation and, of course, is easy to understand. For further information (code examples, source, doc, small howTo) take look at the website: http://blog.greensock.com/tweenfilterliteas3/

Have a try!

Check out this Flash / 3D rendering engine by alternativa platform in Russia - awesome! Almost feels like playing Doom back in the days…

More examples here.

First seen on mr. doob’s blog.

Quite amazing…

Quote: “here it is, our first multi-touch prototyp. a display recognizing multiple touches as well as being pressure sensitive. the method we used is the well known FTIR trick, developed by Jeff Han. concerning the software part we don’t use any pre-made multi-touch software but vvvv for tracking and visualization. therefore we have our own, customized toolkit including self-made freeframe plugins, which is very reliable and accurate.

right now the prototyp is quite robust against daylight and has low latency…although both parameters will be improved. we are working on different projects regarding the multi-touch topic and prototouch will be our test platform”

Check out their site and a video here

Prototype on visualcomplexity