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!

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!

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#

Alternativa3D goes public!

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!