Very nice Flash site. Choose your ballo and join the race…

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

GSDH is happy to announce the entry of two new great talents on the field of Flash and ActionScript programming to our Cape Town team.

Edward Davies has started his successful career as a programmer and web designer quite some time ago and has gained experience in another agency and as a freelancer previously to GSDH. Edward did a BSc in Software Engineering at the University of South Africa. Additionally he completed various courses to improve his skills in the field of webdevelopment. Edward is fluent in ActionScript 2 and 3, Flash, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, XML and knows quite a bit about design and animation.

Our second new entry is Wayne Langman. He finished his training at the well-known institutions CTU Training Institute and the City Varsity College. Wayne is also a Flash-developer and gained quite some work-experience at a well known Cape Town based ad agency before joining GSDH.

Last but not least we would like to introduce our new Designer. His name is Ernst Lass and he is a true Captonian. He graduated as “Student of the Year 2006” from the renowned City Varsity College, where he did an Advanced Diploma in Multimedia Design. He is a master with the Adobe programs Illustrator, Photoshop and Flash and he has already gained some work experience at some other agencies in Cape Town before he was attracted by GSDH. We are more than happy to have him working with us.

GSDH cordially welcomes the new team members and is looking forward to working with both!

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
}