Alex

Alex

Alex's background in the technology industry goes back over 20 years, during which time he has worked for organisations such as the Metropolitan Police, Plessey Naval Systems, and Abbott Mead Vickers. Alex has been a fulltime instructor with Highlander for a number of years, having been involved in training for the last 15 years, and is a regular contributor to beta programmes for Adobe's core products. Alex is an Adobe Certified Expert (ACE) and Adobe Certified Instructor (ACI) for InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash, ActionScript and DreamWeaver. In addition he also teaches courses on CSS, Fireworks, Quark, PHP and MySQL.

Plotting a sine wave

 actionscript 3, Flash  No Responses »
Dec 282010
 

Recently a trainee asked me – How do we go about plotting a sine wave?  We were doing a basic ActionScript course and I was explaining the Drawing API, and how we could easily draw circles and rectangles etc. We then got into working out distances and I mentioned that it is all down to Pythagoras’ theorem, and from there we talked about cosine and sine and the question was  - How do we go about plotting a sine wave?

Well, drawing anything in ActionScript 3 can be accomplished by the lineTo() function, and it would have to run off an ENTER_FRAME event, so that gave us the skeleton functionality of our code…  Read more...

 Posted by Alex on December 28, 2010  Tagged with: , ,

Review of the Beginning Blender book by Lance Flavell

 Blender  No Responses »
Dec 162010
 

This is a review of the Beginning Blender book by Lance Flavell (Open source 3D modeling, animation, and game design) – pdf version.

beginning blender book picture

Beginning Blender

Author: Lance Flavell

Title: Beginning Blender

Number of pages: 449

Publisher: Apress

Price (as of December 17th 2010): ($34.99 and $49.99 respectively)

Format: Comes in pdf and print versions

I love Blender, but ever since 2.5 came out there has been a dearth of good, up-to-date tutorials and documentation. It has been difficult to get information regarding all the various aspects of Blender.  Read more...

 Posted by Alex on December 16, 2010  Tagged with: , , ,

The McGurk effect

 Flash, HTML5  No Responses »
Dec 072010
 

The McGurk effect is basically when what you are seeing overrides what you are hearing.
For example, you are hearing one sound, but the brain receives (at the same time) some visual information and decides to override the auditory information and your brain ‘hears’ another sound. The sound itself never changes, it is just your brain making the change.
Here is a great video showing you the effect. Watch this and see what you think, and also listen but close your eyes at the same time and you will see that the effect goes away – really amazing!
This has implications for animation, but it is really fun to watch!

Could not find video with ID ypd5txtGdGw
Did you like this? Share it:
 Posted by Alex on December 7, 2010  Tagged with: ,

The power of Blender

 Blender  No Responses »
Dec 032010
 

Now that the Blender 2010 Conference is over I want to share with you some of the Blender Conference videos that have been posted that I think show you the power of Blender, as well as some other Blender videos…

Midstraeti - Blender showreel 2010
Runtime
3:19
View count
15,653

 Read more...

Did you like this? Share it:
 Posted by Alex on December 3, 2010  Tagged with: , , ,

How do you use your iPad or iPhone?

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Dec 032010
 

How do you use your iPad or iPhone? With the iPhone being so popular, and now the iPad, I have found a couple of links that I wanted to share with everyone. These links made me laugh or go wow- and I will leave it to you to judge whether the last link is real or not.

YouTube determined that the request did not contain proper authentication.
 Read more...

Did you like this? Share it:
 Posted by Alex on December 3, 2010  Tagged with: ,

WCK and Joints visuals

 Flash  No Responses »
Nov 282010
 
Going back to using WCK (World Construction Kit) and Joints, I thought I would post some more info, as someone looking at the blog post was having problems and needed some more visuals. So here are some WCK Joints visuals…
Setup
Library
World1
Joint
Ball
Rectangle1
Stage
various Rectangle1 objects (named)
various Joint objects (not named)
One World1 object – all the other objects are inside this object
Drop a couple of Rectangle1 objects on to your stage (but inside the World1 object).
The Ball symbol is what I use for my Joints.
Now, drag over a Joint object, but position it on top of one of the Rectangle1 objects. This step is very important, as the WCK will use this overlap to work out how to make the Joint work.
Click on the Joint object on the stage (which should currently be on top of a Rectangle1 object). Then change the Joint properties as follows…

 Read more...

Did you like this? Share it:
 Posted by Alex on November 28, 2010  Tagged with: , , ,

Blender 2.5x and add-ons

 Blender  No Responses »
Oct 302010
 

Blender 2.53 (it is now 2.54, soon to be 2.55) introduced a new way of applying extensions (Python scripts basically). These are called Add-ons and they make playing around with scripts very easy to use and play around with. Blender 2.5x and add-ons are basically setup now in File > user preferences > Add-ons.

And there are a lot of them!

Blender 2.5 add-ons

Blender 2.5 and Add-ons

They can be enabled very easily by just clicking on the checkbox on the right-hand side. For example, here is the standard list of items that can be added to your scene by pressing Shift-A…  Read more...

 Posted by Alex on October 30, 2010  Tagged with: , , ,

Flash CS5 and HTML5

 Flash  2 Responses »
Oct 262010
 

With the advent of HTML5, Flash CS5, and all the brouhaha about them both I thought I would jot down my thoughts on the matter. This post is about Flash CS5 and HTML5, it is not about Flash CS5 vs HTML5.

First though, here is a précis of developments…

Adobe have recently also brought out an HTML5 pack for Illustrator and for Dreamweaver.

Apple have reversed their decision to disallow Flash CS5 apps compiled into iApps onto the iTunes store (although the iPhone and iPad still do not have a flash player).  Read more...

 Posted by Alex on October 26, 2010  Tagged with: , ,

Illustrator and SVG, an example of getting your vectors onto the web

 HTML5, Illustrator  No Responses »
Oct 192010
 

Hot on the heels of an HTML5 pack for Dreamweaver, comes an HTML5 pack for Illustrator…

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/illustrator_html5/

…however Illustrator has been able to output its work to the web for a while, particularly using SVG, so I thought I would do a little experiment and see how Illustrator outputs to SVG.

When you create some artwork you now have several choices in getting that artwork onto a web page. You can…

illustrator export

illustrator export

File > Export > canvas (html)

File > Export > png  Read more...

 Posted by Alex on October 19, 2010  Tagged with: , , , ,

Flash CS5, the World Construction Kit, and Joints

 actionscript 3  4 Responses »
Oct 072010
 

In this post I will show you a simple example of using Flash CS5 , the World Construction Kit, and Joints.

Having created a simple world using the World Construction Kit previously…

The World Construction Kit and Flash Cs5

…I can now play around with the various joints that you are given. For example…

Distance Joints, Revolute joints, Line joints, Weld joints, Mouse Joints, Pulleys, Prismatic joints, Friction joints.

To start with I will just create a Revolute joint and a Distance joint and a Joint that is not a Joint (i.e. type none).  To create these all you need are the following…  Read more...

 Posted by Alex on October 7, 2010  Tagged with: , ,
 Older Entries  Newer Entries

Google Adwords

© 2011 The Highlander Blog Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha