Updates From the Beach!
5 December 2006 | Automata Studios, Fun and/or Random, Naval Gazing | No Comments
You know a conference is good when the weather is really cold and rainy yet everyone keeps raving about how they are having a great time!
Yep - that’s right, Flash on the Beach is a certified hit! On his first time at bat, John Davey - the creator and organizer of FotB managed to knock one out of the park! Great speakers, great venue, and a great vibe! Long live Flash on the Beach!
What’s very cool is that I’ve been able to enjoy this conference with the rest of the Automata crew - both my wife Patti and business partner Keenan were able to come. It’s Keenan’s first conference and he’s having a blast! Patti has been to a conference or two before with me, so she’s been having a great time rec-connecting with other speakers.
On an unrelated note, a collaboration between Josh Davis, Dustin Hostetler, and Automata Studios recently went live - Motokrzr Kaleidoscope. It’s a little online toy made to promote Motorola’s new Krzr phone.
My FOTB Picks
22 November 2006 | Naval Gazing | No Comments
Since all the cool kids are doing it, here are my picks for sessions at Flash on the Beach:
…and now for something completely different
Craig Swan
Craig is a buddy of mine, and it is always a treat to see what random hardware/software hacking he’s been up to.
Explorations with ActionScript 3
Branden Hall
Well, I have to be at my session, and you should be there too!
Revolution 2
Nicolas Cannasse
This was a toughie, but I have a soft spot for compilers so I want to find out more about haXe. Otherwise I’d check out Aral’s talk, since that looks really good as well.
Create Unique User Experiences With Custom Flex Components
Mark Anders
I haven’t done much with custom Flex components yet, so this is very interesting to me. However, if you haven’t seen Erik Natzke’s “Keep Interest(ed)” talk before, it’s really good!
Contains one scene of sheep skinning
Brendan Dawes
Ah yes, my evil, british twin! I caught the tail end of his talk in Flash Forward Austin, and really want to see the whole thing!
Creating meaning from chaos!
Marcos Weskamp
Marcos is a madman when it comes to information visualization and a constant source of awe and inspiration!
Vecmaps and Bitters
Rich Shupe
I know distressingly little about blend modes and how they can and should be used - looks like this session will cover that and more.
Screenweaver haXe
Edvin van Rijkom
Open source tool for making cross platform desktop applications with Flash? Yes, please!
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Game Development But Were Afraid to Ask
Francis Bourre
I have a soft spot for game development… back in the days of Flash 3 and FlashZone.com I wrote a short game development article series. How far we have come! If I had any video skills at all I would be tempted to check out Hillman’s session.
Flash in a Web 2.0 World
Geoff Stearns
I use SWFObject, I love SWFObject and I’d love to know more about it’s guts.
Creating Multiplayer Flash Games
Jobe Makar
There I go again feeding my jones for Flash gaming… (it doesn’t hurt that Jobe has created some of the best multiplayer Flash games ever!)
Creative Evolution: Behind the Scenes
Hoss Gifford
Hoss tells it like it is, and with a huge dollop of humor to boot! I’m particularly interested in learning “How and why to pretend to be an artist”.
JavaScript Flash – scripting your tools of the trade
Peter Elst
I use JSFL so rarely and for such specific tasks that I’ve never really gotten a good 50,000ft view of what’s possible with it - looks like Peter is going to clue me in!
Mashup Baby!
Mario Klingemann
Mario’s work is such an inspiration I love checking it out! I’m also very interested in Chris Curzon’s AI talk at the same time so I might do some session hopping.
Flash on the Beach
13 November 2006 | ActionScript 3, Fun and/or Random | No Comments
Just a quick note - all of us at Automata Studios are currently getting our passports in order and securing babysitting for the first week of December because we’re all going to Flash on the Beach in Brighton there in merry old England!
It looks like it’s going to be a great event - tons of my buds (too many to list - go check out the speaker list, it’s killer!). There will also be a full contingent of Adobians there including Mike “Scary Good at Halo” Chambers and Mike “Also Scary Good at Halo” Downey.
I will be speaking about using ActionScript 3 in non-RIA applications - games, toys, art, etc - it should be a lot of fun (I even have most of it ready already!) I hope to see a bunch of new and old faces so if you’re not already signed go now!
Typography in Flash - UPDATED
28 October 2006 | Technology, ActionScript 2 | 3 Comments
One of the large projects that Automata Studios is currently working on involves a lot of text and some very picky designers (this isn’t a bad thing!) that want their text to look exactly in Flash as it does in the photoshop graphical comps.
Now, we’re not total dolts when it comes to typography, but we’re not experts either. One thing I wasn’t terribly clear on was kerning vs. tracking, and it just so happens that both were causing a problem trying to match those graphical comps. All of our textfields use stylesheets but no matter what we did we couldn’t for the life of us match the comps. To finally fix things we needed to both give ourselves a crash course in typography and work around a bug in Flash 8.
Kerning has to do with trying to make the 2D whitespace between any two given letters approximately equal (or at least aesthetically pleasing). To support kerning a font has to contain data on how to space specific letter pairs. A good example is W and A - to look nice the A technically needs to extend a little under the W. With stylesheets in Flash you can enable kerning, so we’re good so far.
Tracking also relates to the spacing between letters. Tracking controls the amount of spacing between all letters. Since it’s not specific to particular letters, a font doesn’t need to contain any extra information to support tracking. With stylesheets in Flash you can change tracking via the “letter-spacing” property. The problem is that you are limited to whole pixel values! This fact is particularly distressing since if you just used a TextFormat object to “style” some text, you can use decimals in it’s “letterSpacing” property and it works just fine!
It turns out that when you use stylehsheets in Flash, under the surface all that is happening is a translation from the stylesheet data into TextFormat objects. The built in code that translates the “letter-spacing” stylesheet property into the “letterSpacing” TextFormat property is buggy - it chops off the decimal part of the value. To solve this you just have to make your own class that extends the StyleSheet class and override the “transform” method that handles those transformations.
That would be the end of the story except that for some reason, in some circumstances (I haven’t nailed down what causes this yet), the Flash compiler forgets that within your shiny new class the keyword “super” is invalid. Obviously it’s not invalid, but the compiler (sometimes) seems to think so. So yeah… that’s fun.
Luckily I have had to hack around the compiler before so by judiciously using our old friend “eval” you can make everything work hunky dory - hope this helps someone else!
FixedStyleSheet.as
UPDATE
As requested here is a full, working example - LetterSpacingExample.zip
Note that the font must be embedded for this to work properly.
A Bit of a Pain
15 October 2006 | Naval Gazing | No Comments
Last week we brought Dave Stiller up to play with us for the week (he’s now a contractor for Automata Studios - welcome Dave!) Just for fun he and I did some pair programming on Friday trying to bust out a cross-platform mobile application we’re developing.
Because of the cross-platform bit, and because our attempt to make the Flash 7 player for Pocket PC (this was prior to the Flash Lite 2 release) failed miserably due to memory issues, we are using an obscure but relatively nice development tool called GoDB. It lets you take a single code base and compile for Pocket PC, Palm, Symbian, and a few others.
So, anyways, Dave and I are hacking away and one of the things we have to get working is dynamic coloring. All of the colors that were in our database were in 24bit format - 8 bits per color. However, GoDB only supports 16 bit color, in as it says in it’s manual 5-6-5 format. It turns out it’s not that simple and Dave and I had to crack our skulls together for more than a half hour to figure out what the hell was going on.
Deciphering the GoDB manual was the first step - it’s not the worst tech manual I’ve ever dealt with, but it’s still pretty bad at times. Finally we find something that says that in order to actually display black you need to use 1 rather than the expected 0 - it turns out 0 means something like transparent. It also turns out that if that first, least significant bit is ever 0, no matter what other bits are on - you’re gonna get transparent. Ugh.
So, it turns out that the actual format of the color is 5-6-4-1 - but you need to treat the blue as if it has 5 bits, but always turn on that first bit. I repeat, ugh.
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