Create 2D animation with Flash

ToonBoom
http://www.toonboom.com/main/
Toon Boom Studio is ideal for individuals looking for an all-in-one animation software. From drawing digitally, scanning hand-drawn animations or seamlessly importing existing artwork, Studio enables you to lip-sync your animation, setup the action in a 3D space and publish your animation projects for TV, HDTV, the Web and iPod!

Skillrex Quest

Skillrex Quest
Just as you have last heard a great work from this side of the world (Flash), JODA mashed two of the seemingly impossible genre together, RPG and Skillrex (dubstep). The site is an adver-game with a very high production value as you will notice a lot of homeage to tradiitional video game characters and sound effects. Check out Nothing Gonna Stop Me Now also.

via HN

FIFA Development Globe

FIFA Development Globe
A visulisation of FIFA’s development around the world that can be viewed in fullscreen.

AS3 - Getting FlashVars (variable) from HTML to SWF

Have you ever scratch your head wondering how you could pass data from HTML files to SWF?
Found a discussion on Stackoverflow that enables that.

View the solution on StackOverflow

Draw an arc inside a square

Below is a snippet on how you can draw arcs on four corner inside a square.
Why would you do that? Imagine you are designing a storytelling tutorial which requires you to dim down the entire scene, and then carve a rounded corner square within the “dimmed” screen.

Think of CityVille’s tutorial mode in Facebook games.

View Code snippet - Draw an Arc inside a Square on Snipplr

Adobe AIR 3.5 released

If you are an avid developer that is looking to create content for mobile devices, rejoice as the latest version of Adobe AIR adds support for Jellybean devices and iOS6.

Adobe AIR 3.5 is released for download at Adobe’s website.
Download Adobe AIR 3.5

Changes of usage of _autoAlpha in Tweener AS3

This has to be a post I need to make to remind myself in the future. I almost wet my pants when I found my code to automatically hide an object invisibility, doesn’t work in AS3 anymore.
The usual code is like...

Tweener.addTween(myMC, {_autoAlpha:1,time:1,transition:"linear"})

in which there is no problem with the syntax. But upon searching through the vast sea of internet. This post at http://lists.caurinauebi.com/pipermail/tweener-caurinauebi.com/2007-October/000293.html

enlighten my life that most of the special parameter that is not “official” will need an intialisation like :

import caurina.transitions.properties.DisplayShortcuts;
DisplayShortcuts.init();

Same, as the poster commented, hated to do these initialisation. But for the goodness sake of the API growth, it will help to keep the main API non-polluted, so to speak. My god.

Update : 8th July 2008
Got into more tips on using _Blur_blurX instead of the usual _blur_blurX now from this blog comment. And of course, you need to initalize your Tweener script once before using it.

import caurina.transitions.properties.FilterShortcuts;
FilterShortcuts.init();

Thanks for voting

Again I would like to express my gratitude over the weekend on your stay here. Of course at the same time I'm interested to share my knowledge over my slow transition from AS2 to AS3.

Best use of interactive media, yet.

Uniqlock
I am always impressed by my fellow mentors from the East in creating creative campaigns for brands, be it big or small. I would rather say it is unconventional that is what makes this campaign so big and successful, and there is countless websites that has already reviewed on the campign itself, but I wouldn't want to talk on it again. Somehow it does proves the fact that something that walks along the line of beautiful, pretty, soft-core, but yet usable-effective idea, will be 'possibly' successful, the rest depends on how is the brand trusting the agency in implementing mind blowing ideas or execution.

Case study
The video that explains the campaign in short. In about 1 minute.

Innovation Within Mind

floe
One of the most amazing stuff that you can always do with Flash is to present an idea through motion, sound or poetry, and in return, influence people to change for better. This is one of the initiatives to encourage individuals to take action in curbing the global warming issue.


World's first balloon race
Probably this would be one of the most clueless site that I have been to so far, in terms of how they are going to implement the event. It is a global event which encourages participant to place a widget on their website to entitle for racers to go through their website when the race starts. Only 3 Days to go. Did you take part?



Thermo
It is a project that is still kept under wrapped by Adobe themselves, but from what we can see from the wiki site itself, it is something that allows designer to create rich internet application with ease without spending too much effort into hacking or pulling their hair off. Looks promising at this point of time.


You Be The Driver
I wouldn't say or claim that this site will have something that is technologically mindblowing to keep you within the site, but the game itself is good and polished enough to keep you entertained. That includes the visuals designed inside.


Moodstream - by Getty Images
What would be the best search engine to your content? Some might say Google, but this tool would be appealing towards designers because it allows user to search through their feeling, that a generic search might not be able to replicate, in terms of what you really want to find. A very great approach to help stock image finder. This perhaps will inspire a lot of Flash designers or developers in looking to build more visual search engines.

Joshua Davis Presentation Workshop Slides
Something to share.

SWFAddress

SWFAddress - Deep Linking For Flash (and ajax)
Horray! The days of Flash bashing is (almost) over! And the complains has always been made that there is no possibility to deep linking inside Flash, that hurts when you want to bookmark a 'certain' area on a very cool flash site. Probably what is worse when you are going through a shopping cart and wanted to go back and forth using the browser's back and forward button. This has come to shed 'some' light to you. Upon a quick look inside the implementation. It would be applicable to corporate or portfolio sites, which normally uses 'label' for targetting from one section to another, because for this to work, we will have to use 'anchor' inside Flash, just like how HTML's anchor link works.

For example, an anchor link in HTML looks like...
link
and then it will directly bring the user towards the relevant page.
This applies that the almost similiar function will appear using SWFAddress.

Geoquake - Driving virtually

GeoQuake - Driving on Google Maps
This is one of the crazy invention from our fellow friend from the East that came up with a mashup of both driving simulator and Google Maps. What happens here is, he started off with building a parking simulation game in Flash, and then ended up applying the Google Maps Flash API. And it became something entirely new, and perhaps, useful! You could probably virutally drive to the place you want to be in advance before reaching there? I'm wondering how hard would it be to implement hit test on this global map, probably something that the Google team can work out to team up with someone and build literally, a driving simulation game. Hmm... I wouldn't want to drive onto the ocean.