Posts Tagged ‘flex’
Flash On The Beach 2O1O
Wonderful news!!! Yesterday I got a confirmation email stating I’m selected to speak at Flash On The Beach 2010 during the Elevator Pitch session.
FOTB is one of the top events of the year, so I’m really honoured to have the opportunity to speak there!
Anyway, so much to show, and so little time… luckily I have 4 months to decide what to show and what not to show 
By the way, if you don’t have your ticket for FOTB yet, I suggest you get one quickly. It looks like they’re flying out the door at a steady pace.
See you at FOTB!
While exploring the features of the Flint Particle System, I tought it would be cool to surprise my girlfriend with a “particle message”. I programmed a Flash module that uses 3500 pixel particles to put messages on the screen.
Once it was finished I decided to put it online, and changed it so you can create your own messages using a simple form.
You can see the application here: http://www.veryinteractivepeople.com/lab/particlemessenger
In the bottom left corner there’s a button called “create your own”, if you click that button a form will be presented that allows you to create your own messages. You can then share these messages on facebook, or just copy the message link and send it to your friends.
If anyone wants to use this on a website, or as part of a viral ad campaign, please contact me.
Here are some example messages:
http://www.veryinteractivepeople.com/lab/particlemessenger/?o=true&message=i,♥,QRSUiDNFm (I love particles)
http://www.veryinteractivepeople.com/lab/particlemessenger/?o=true&message=HNiOU,SPDLm (Flint rocks)
Have fun!
The Flex TitleWindow component is a great start for making dialog panels, because it has a close button in the title bar. By clicking the button this component automatically dispatches a CloseEvent. Nice, but… this button doesn’t show the hand cursor on roll over.
Personally I find it very annoying one has to set the buttonMode to true for each and every component. In some of the default Flex components this can be a real pain. Here’s how one can set the buttonMode for the close button of the TitleWindow component:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 | <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <mx:TitleWindow showCloseButton="true" creationComplete="init()" xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute" width="400" height="100" title="My title window"> <mx:Script> <![CDATA[ private function init():void{ if(mx_internal::closeButton!=null) mx_internal::closeButton.buttonMode = true; } ]]> </mx:Script> </mx:TitleWindow> |
I’m using Flex 3.2, so it’s possible this no longer works in newer versions.
Flex tip: Alert improvements
Today, I started working on a new internet application in Flex… and I ran into some of the same annoying default Flex component behaviors I usually change or work around. These are small details, but the application will look so much more polished and professional when they are implemented.
Alert.show() for example creates an alert dialog, but the text inside the dialog is selectable and the buttons don’t show a hand cursor on rollover. One could argue that the alert message should be selectable so people can copy it. But personally I don’t like this behavior.
To make the text unselectable, you can do the following (I’m using Flex 3.2, so it’s possible this will no longer work in new versions):
1 2 | var a:Alert=Alert.show("This is an alert", "Alert", Alert.OK | Alert.CANCEL,this); a.mx_internal::alertForm.mx_internal::textField.selectable = false; |
And to show a hand cursor for the buttons, all one has to do is this:
1 | a.buttonMode=true; |
At my day job (http://www.epyc.be), we developed a framework for rendering exercises (drag and drop, select text, multiple choice, fill in,… you name it, we got it). One of the features of this framework is font libraries on exercise level. In this way we can use different fonts and only load them when needed. If in an application we have for example 100 multiple choice questions that need font A, and only one of those questions needs font B, font B will be loaded when that specific exercise is rendered. Once loaded they are cached in memory, in case another exercise needs the same font library.
When an exercise is loaded, the first thing the base class does is loading the necessary font library in order to render the exercise. In the exercise logic, whenever we need a font, we can create one like this:
1 2 3 4 | var font:Font=FontMananger.getInstance().getFont( fontName, fontLibrary ); |
In theory, this would also allow the use of foreign character sets…. Only in theory, because when we finally needed this feature, we ran into a “little” problem.
A font library in our system is an empty swf file with some embedded fonts. We normally create these libraries by clicking “new font” in the library:
This workflow worked fine until we had to create a Polish version of one of our projects. The problem is that it is impossible to define which characters you want to embed when embedding fonts in the library. Flash only embeds a basic char set. Strangly enough, when embedding a font for a specific text field, you CAN define the extra character set :
So, it looks like the folks at Adobe simply forgot about this. We tried everything, but no success using the Flash IDE.
Eventually we had to switch to Flexbuilder to create the font libraries. Here’s how we did this:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 | package { import flash.display.Sprite; import flash.text.Font; public class FontLib extends Sprite { [Embed(systemFont = "Arial", fontName = "Arial", mimeType = "application/x-font", unicodeRange = "U+0-U+00FF,U+0100-U+01FF,U+0200-U+02FF" )] public var DefaultFont:Class; public function FontLib() { } } } |
As you can see, in Flex we can define the Unicode ranges that need to be embedded. In this way we can create font libraries containing Baltic or Cyrillic character sets, or even Chinese!
There’s also a little problem with this workflow: Since the DefaultFont class is defined inside the FontLib application class, the compiler internally changes the class name to “FontLib_DefaultFont”. After loading this font library, and we want to create an instance of a certain font class, we have to add “FontLib_” before the class name.
Conclusion: Adobe, please add functionality to the Flash IDE so we can define extra character sets to be embedded when embedding fonts in the library!
If anyone knows a way of doing this by using the Flash IDE, please let me know.
New generative art series
After months of experimenting with the medium, I’m finally pleased with the results of my generative art engine. Next thing on the list is to create some high resolution pieces and then print and frame the best ones.
Here are some of my latest artworks:
If anyone is interested in buying high quality glicee prints (signed and numbered offcourse), let me know.
