Great news for the Flash community: Google added an upgrade to its indexing capabilities which improves the search quality of Flash tremendously. Previously external content loaded in by a SWF file has not been identified by Google. With this latest upgrade all this content also appears in Google search results.

We are very happy to see Google making such important changes to their excellent search engine. With the improvements of Flash indexing, GSDH expects Google to continue its service competencies making the web even more eventful, dynamic and exciting.

Specializing in Flash, GSDH is proud to offer the next level in design and programming.

Read the official Google Blog entry here

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…

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…

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;
}

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!