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

When I just got my driving license, It felt like I was set free – I could go wherever I want, whenever I want.. few years later I got a similar feeling when as a graphic design student I started to script flash – suddenly I could do whatever I want (well, almost) completely on my own, in really short time.

As a teenager I didn’t mind how polluting my first car really was, just as I did not see that at some point Adobe became a web-monopoly and Flash their mean of control.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Flash, I spent years convincing clients that Flash is a standard, a good platform to interact with people and deliver contents, the open source flash development looked (and still does) promising and progress really fast. But at the end – it’s Adobe that control the gate, the Flash player.
I guess this is why there is no bidirectional text support (yet), a monstrous security system, and other limitations that are in Adobe’s responsibility and could (should?) have been addressed by now.

Reading Aral’s post about iPhone not supporting Flash, (funny comments btw..) demonstrates the case, I don’t blame Apple for not supporting flash though. A very different point of view, a more technology oriented perspective of the strategy behind the iphone OS environment and plugins absence in it’s Safari browser.

I expect to see Adobe take control and push their Lab and community to main focus, money is important but WE – the users – are more important.

Hi, my name is Adi.
I have 10 years of experience in the web design & development industry but I still can’t find a proper title for what I do. Basically I do all kind of cool stuff, mainly with Flash. From financial charting systems, through interactive TV/VOD interfaces, flash badges and application embeds, and even few games and websites… I tasted almost everything ;)
Recent clients: MutualArt, ICQ/AOL, Easy-Forex, Microsoft R&D, OpenTV, Logia, and more.

About me
I come from Graphic Design background, studied Communication Design at HIT (Holon Institute of Technology, 1997-2001). As a student I was fascinated by the Timeline factor & User Interaction in digital interfaces (in contrary to the traditional static Print design) and my imagination was set free by Macromedia Flash (back then it was version 3, around 1998). I stopped designing for print, and all my academic projects and implementations from that point on were digital.

In 1999, I teamed up with Liat (Industrial designer, UI specialist) and Udi (Information Technology and Management), and together we founded a web design company. We developed CMS driven websites and specialized in Flash utilization.
After the company was acquired in 2003, I joined few other studios, giving art direction and some hands-on design work, making new friends and contacts, and got deeper and deeper into flash scripting and programing (at least from designer point of view).

In 2005 I established a new company – TODEPOINT, where my graphic design abilities and understanding of human factors become a special added value as a Flash programer, and my practical/technical knowledge affects and improves my designs, I somehow see both worlds.
In this blog I will try to reflect my unique point of view, somewhere between Flash developer and Web/GUI designer, covering my thoughts, struggles and discoveries.

We're using the random object for many things, by its nature it may repeat a number, but sometimes we don't want to get the same number more than once, for example when showing a random image out of an array of images, or jumping to a random frame in a MovieClip. Currently there is no 'unique' function in Actionscript, you have to write your own solution.

Here is my class for generating random numbers:

Download: RandomPlus.as.

Usage:
Create an instance of RandomPlus, defining the numbers scope (start & end numbers), including negative values. in case only one parameter is passed the RandomPlus object will assume it is the end number and that the start number is zero:
var rp:RandomPlus = new RandomPlus( end:Number, start:Number = 0 );

After that you can use 'getNum' public function that will return a random number within the scope:
rp.getNum(); // returns a Number

You can use public var 'len' to retrieve the length of the scope in case you want to use it for your function:
rp.len; // returns a Number

*The object will return unlimited amount of numbers, each time the entire scope was returned it will reshuffle the items so it will continue to return random numbers within the scope, in an ever-changing order.

Let me know if you liked it (or if you have suggestions), enjoy :)