A blog about User Interface, User Experience, Design, Flash, Product management and all that goes in between.

While working on the video player, I wanted to show spinning loading animation while buffering, and since I decided that the whole thing will be pure code, with no library assets, I had to code this animation – just the kind of things I like.
It didn’t take long, and I decided to share it – why not?

So here it is:

What you need to do in order to use it is add two functions:


import LoadAnim;
...
private var myAnim :LoadAnim;
...

public function hideAnim():void
{
myAnim.stopAnim();
removeChildAt(1);
}

Download the class here, enjoy : )

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.

Flash objects (SWF) can fill the entire Html body, and scale along with browser window as you resize it (it’s done by setting width and height attributes to 100% in the embed tags). However unless scaleMode is properly defined as well, the outcome may look surprisingly bad, the flash content may loose proportions and distort, images quality drops and texts loose readability.. oh man.

Only specific contents should be scaled when the stage is resized, the same way apps handles resizing: an app will redistribute its panels without scaling them, will scale panel background but not the buttons and the controls in it. When the entire stage is simply scaled, the interface balance is disturbed.. and we don’t want that.

So I decided to share: ResizeManager (download) is a very simple scaling engine, a single AS2 class that can easily be modified or extended for your needs.
The manger can control scaling and some basic align options of MovieClips you register to it, so you can scale a background MovieClip to cover the entire stage, and keep another MovieClip centered without scaling. It also adds default definitions for the Stage behavior (scaleMode: noScale, stageAlign: TL), though you can change those.
In order to use it, simply import the class and create an instance of the ResizeManager:

import com.adifeiwel.custom_ui.ResizeManager;

var rm = new ResizeManager();


Then, use method registerMC() to register each MovieClip you want to control (including MovieClips nested within MovieClips, make sure parent MC is x:0, y:0), the registerMC method expects the following parameters:
_parentName:MovieClip (the name of the MoviClip)
_widthUpdate:Number (scaling in percentage from Stage.width, 0 for no-scale)
_heightUpdate:Number (scaling in percentage from Stage.height, 0 for no-scale)
_centerUpdate:Boolean (align MovieClip to center of stage)
_middleUpdate:Boolean (vertical-align MovieClip to middle of stage)

for example (see it here):

rm.registerMC(portMC.mainBG, 100, 100, false, false);
// will scale to cover all Stage

rm.registerMC(portMC.vClip, 0, 80, false, false);
// will scale to take 80% of Stage.height


enjoy : )

Update: You can download the example FLA here.

I was going through the SWX PHP contest entries, and was so happy to find an entry under the API category for the WordPress platform by Benjamin Wiederkehr, it is something I was considering to do my self ; ), and can be really handy for small personal sites or blogs that prefer a customized experience over the standard Html themes – portfolios, galleries, open for commenting – you see the potential..These APIs are best demonstrating the power of SWX, allowing us – flash programers to expand our possibilities and offering without messing with server-side too much – just what Aral was talking about.cool.

I am working on a new project that requires serverside development, using Apache, MySQL and PHP. However I didn’t want to change my current personal webserver configuration – the one that comes with OS X, and I remembered my friend Eran’s tip about MAMP – an independent standalone webserver, but never got to download it.Then, few days later, Aral released SWX PHP 1.0 (remember SWX?), and offers a very convenient way to start playing with SWX in minutes, using no other that a MAMP bundle, already configured with a useful Start Page linking to the SWX Service Explorer & Data Analyzer , can’t be simpler than that.. try it out!Great work Aral! I liked the Screencast explaining how to set it up, Aral simply explode you with knowledge : )

I also find the SWX icon very amusing in my dock..