Freelance flash & html5 developer. Melbourne, Australia

This week I started playing around with colour analysis in html5. I used it to create an image collage of your Facebook profile from your Facebook friends photos. I was quite surprised at how well it preformed particularly on mobile. As its nearly Christmas I managed to role this experiment into an interactive Christmas app.

This week I put my new portfolio site live showcasing some of the client work I’ve done over the past two years. I decided to it would also be a good opportunity to skill up on the latest advances in html5. The concept behind the site was to create a typically Flash style experience but using javascript/css3 and html5 instead. The most interesting feature of the site is the fullscreen animated background. This was created using the…

PayCalc is a new app I created for iPhone. It allows you to enter your total income and you can quickly view your net income across any pay period, Yearly, Monthly, Weekly etc. You can also calculate your income in reverse for example, you can enter your net income per week and then view your gross income per year. Its quick and simple to use, its free for a limited time so head over to the Apple store to download it.

I’ve just switched over to IntelliJ as my actionscript editor. The IDE is great, really fast with some great features. Check out the review over at Flash magazine.
They only recently introduced actionscript support so its still kind of light on customisation for developing with the Flash platform. One thing that was driving me nuts is that when you debug a swf it always opens in a new window. There is no close previous player or terminate process. However…

I’ve been playing around the BezierPatch primitive in away3D recently. It works in a similar way to the bezier surface i created. Its quite easy to create some very interesting effects. The source for this is on wonder.fl so fork it and make it your own.

BezierPatch away3D – wonderfl build flash online

If you have read my previous posts on drawTriangles, you will see that I love warping images. I decided to take this a bit further by using a Bezier surface. A bezier surface or bezier patch can warp a grid by using a set of control points…

I was surprised recently to learn that the actionscript drawing api did not include a dashed-line style in the options. Well not to worry, drawing a dashed line is fairly straightforward. You just need to calculate the distance between each drawing points and divide it by the gap space. Then use a loop to draw multiple lines between the points, toggling the alpha to 0 or 1 on each iteration. Its not…

Adobe introduced some new functions in the flash 10 drawing api for 3d support. One of them is drawTriangles. This enables bitmaps to be drawn to a 3d mesh. But it can also be used in 2d for skewing and warp effects. In a nutshell it allows you to define a shape and then map points of a bitmap to this shape. Click on the examples below to see…

This is one function that should be in every flash developer’s toolbox. I’m so over adjusting textfields and font sizes to fit different lengths of content. There had to be better way I thought. How about a one size fits all solution. The function below uses a while loop to reduce the font size of the textfield one pt at a time until the text fits within the bounds of the width and height. Its almost too easy.

Flash Catalyst. Its great isn’t it? Import your layout file and quickly create flex components. Catalyst exports a layout to a flex project file (FXP). In flash builder you can import this file as a new project. However I’ve found it is pretty tricky to import these new components into to an existing project because it requires alot of a refactoring or an additional source path.
I frequently use the export to swc feature within the Flash IDE to…