Archive for June, 2008

How to stroke several sprites as one

If you’re trying to create a single stroke (outline, contour) over several sprites or movieClips, you can simply create a parent object to hold them and apply a glow filter to it. In this example (yeah, it’s an old and basic as2 thing, a test I did ages ago) I applied a glow filter of 2 pixels Blur to the comic balloon background.

The background is made of two movieClips, each has it’s own behavior, if you click the horn you can adjust its size and direction, if you click the text area you can scale the textField and the balloon background along with it.

This trick can be really handy if you’re making animations of moving silhouettes. In this flash I used GreenSock’s TransformManager to make the textField and horn controlable.

Silverlight, do I know you?

AIR != Silverlight
Mrinal Wadhwa:

Microsoft Silverlight is a browser plugin and is sort of similar to Adobe’s Flash Player and Flex Framework taken together

Adobe AIR is cross platform desktop runtime that allows developers to build desktop applications using web technologies, it has no real equivalent in the Microsoft world.

Peter Elst also finds it important to differentiate..

So many people ask me – “How is Silverlight?” or “Is Silverlight a real threat to Flash?”.. well, I never even tried Silverlight. (I did install the plugin, but simply never got to a website that uses Silverlight..)
So the only answer I can give is: when aiming at the web industry (us developers), such a difference in user/client perception must result in different adoption trends, evident: I did not try.. but the logo looks kinda cool.