Animating with JavaScript is relatively easy, however if you are used to ActionScript 3 it can be particularly painful to go back to learn how JavaScript does things, compared to how AS3 does things. Enter EaselJS. This is a new JavaScript library that aims to make animating and controlling objects within a web page easy – particularly if you are used to AS3.
It is built by Grant Skinner and can be found here…
This post is about introducing the concept of wireframing – specifically what is wireframing and do you need it/should you use it.
With the advent of the iPhone, iPad, tablets and smartphones in general, I have often found myself with the need to first draw a rough sketch of my idea to show people. Initially I just used pencil and paper, but then I wondered – are there apps out there for me use? and should I use them?
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…
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…
In the past, when looking for physics simulations in Actionscript 3, I used Box2DFlash. Although it worked very well, the problem was the documentation. It was terrible, and it would take me days to work something out and go through various examples, most of which didn’t apply to the latest version of Box2DFlash, but they were the only examples around.
Eventually I managed get a simple structure together, various boxes moving, bouncing and being able to be controlled by a mouse. I will eventually blog about the example I created as I think it will be a useful exercise for people usingBox2DFlash and for people who wish to see just what is possible in Actionscript 3.
Yes that’s right, you can now build iPhone apps with Flash using the functionality which was introduced in Flash CS5, following Apple’s announcement last night that it is relaxing the rules in it’s “App Store Review Guidelines”.
You might recall Adobe introduced this great new functionality earlier this year with Flash CS5, allowing Flash developers to build apps in Flash and then compile them quickly and easily to run on an iPhone or iPad as native apps. Apple then issued an announcement on almost the same day as the launch that it was changing it’s T’s and C’s so that apps compiled with 3rd party tools (such as Flash) wouldn’t be accepted into the iTunes Store. There was quite a bit of noise around this at the time as Apple had basically squashed the single biggest new features in Flash CS5 in one go.
In training, I frequently create examples on my mac, get them working, tweak them, and then copy them over to my trainees pcs. In doing so, I have come across a few problems that I thought I would share with you, and the solutions (not perfect) that I have used to fix these issues.
What I normally do is create a new Actionscript project on my mac. Create and test the files and get everything ready for the training.
Then I copy the whole project folder onto a training pc, and sometimes I end up with problems. For example…
Using Flash Builder a lot as I do I am always on the look out for new extensions. Recently I came across a lovely new extension from Adobe. It is called Blueprint.
Blueprint – a Flash Builder Extension, allows you to search the web for examples of code, directly within Flash Builder.
For example, suppose you are tweening and want to see what examples you can find regard the Tween class. Just highlight Tween and press CTL-B (Mac) or Alt – B (PC).
This brings up the Blueprint panel, with the search results.
ByteArrays are very useful. I use them when saving image data out in the form of jpgs or pngs. You can also use them with sound data.
However someone recently asked me what about video? Can we use them to hold video data?
Well, pre-flash player 10.1 the answer is no. But now with flash player 10.1 you can use ByteArrays and videos with Actionscript 3. The methods concerned are…
appendBytes()
appendBytesAction()
…running off the NetStream class.
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