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

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

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#

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;
}

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!

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!