Until yesterday most of my Adobe AIR experimentation had been with Flash and a tiny bit with Flex.
Yesterday I started working with the AIR SDK and playing around with some html AIR apps.
I was happy to find that both iframes and cookies work in AIR. Apparently since AIR uses the Safari WebKit for its browsing [...]
I just got an email with the subject of “ParaLegal Training”. Here is the email message:
Do you like watching “Law and Order” and have a knack for for understanding plots and legal terms?
If so, you could be earning well over $85,000 a year as a paralegal.
Start earning what your worth - Never [...]
The Software & Information Industry Association has announced the 2008 Codie Awards. Cold Fusion 8 was the winner of the “Best Web Services Solution” category.
It’s great to see ColdFusion get the recognition it deserves as a powerful programming language and web services creator/integrator. As a designer, I’ve always been impressed with how robust cf can [...]
Ever since I got hooked on iStockPhoto a few years back, I’ve been wondering when someone would create a similar site for audio (particularly music clips). Sure Flashkit has a kind of similar thing. And there are some great audio clip sites like Beatsuite, but the great thing about iStock has always been great quality [...]
Web Address: www.caregiversupport.org
Company: Caregiver Support
Summary: This site and logo were designed for a non-profit organization called Caregiver Support that helps people who care for older family members or friends.
I used Photoshop to create the design concept and XHTML/CSS to do the layout. This site has a Flash tabbed app on the home page that cycles [...]
One of the major issues in designing web pages using standards compliant code is browser to browser testing. On a recent project, I was testing in Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Netscape, Opera and Safari. I thought I had covered my bases.
It turns out Internet Explorer 6 was even worse with styles than IE7, thus [...]
Sometimes you want to highlight or delete the value of an HTML form field when a user clicks on it. This is very simple to do using javascript. Just add the following to your input tag:
To Highlight:
onFocus=”this.select()”
To Delete:
onFocus=”this.value=””
Here are examples of how each of these works:
Have fun and be careful!
I’m still trying to decide if this is completely genius or completely insane. Yesterday Gnarls Barkley released their new album “The Odd Couple” for free as one backwards (yes, reversed from finish to start) mp3 file. I’m leaning more towards genius. At least genius in that it’s a new clever promo idea that has never [...]
April 17, 2008 – 10:02 am
Rock Band has been one of the best investments ever. I bought it earlier this year, and haven’t been disappointed in any way except one: There are no Rock Band guitars for individual purchase. In other words, to use Rock Band to its full 4-man-band rocking potential, you have to buy a Guitar Hero guitar [...]
April 10, 2008 – 11:13 am
I just found a very cool web app that I wanted to share. In fact, it’s so cool that it is not only going in the “Web App Review” section of my site, but ALSO the “Design Tips” section. It’s just that cool.
One major issue I’ve run into when building a website for a smaller [...]
Use this code to set the focus on a text field instance in your Flash:
myTextField.stage.focus = myTextField;
Note: This only works once the user has already clicked on the swf. For example, if you had a button in your Flash that said “click here to fill out a form”, and then when they clicked that button [...]
Tracking key presses can be useful both form Flash games (i.e. up, down, left, right keys) or even forms and other types of interactivity (enter key, etc.). It’s pretty simple to do in AS3 using the KeyboardEvent object. Here are a couple examples:
The first thing we need to do is set up a listener to [...]
loadMovie is gone in AS3. I liked to use loadMovie to pull swfs and jpgs into existing movie clips on the stage. You can still do this fairly easily by using the load() method. Here’s how:
var i =new Loader();
i.load(new URLRequest(yourimage.jpg));
movieClipInstance.addChild(i)
Basically we are loading the image into a Loader called “i”. Next we add i as [...]
I’m excited to be able to speak at TODCon again this year. It’s a fun group of people and a great conference. TODCon runs from June 6 through the 8th and will take place at the Wyndham in Orlando, FL.
This year my topics are Adobe AIR for designers and Creating a Flash video web [...]
Web Address: www.lifestyleprops.com
Company: Lifestyle Properties
Summary: Lifestyle Properties is a local real estate company that specializes in high-end canyon condo sales. They needed a site that would look as professional as the company itself. It was also very important that all the content be search engine optimized so that they could be found in the very [...]
When Actionscript 2 came out, I stopped using buttons and the old Actionscript 1 on(release) methods and starting creating movie clips for my buttons and using instanceName.onRelease functions to make buttons out of those movie clips.
Now with AS3 there is a new way to perform these functions. It’s not much harder than the old [...]
That’s right folks. In Actionscript 3, your good old friend setRGB is long gone. But you can still set the color of a movie clip by using the new ColorTransform method.
The first step is simply to import ColorTransform so you can use it in your Flash
import flash.geom.ColorTransform;
Then do the following to change the color [...]
E4X may be the best thing about Flash CS3! It stands for ECMAScript for XML and it is the new way to interact with XML in Flash AS3. What is ECMAScript? I don’t know - nor do I care. What I do know is it ROCKS your socks off. If you have used XML in [...]
March 27, 2008 – 11:34 am
Dmode posted a good article on how to create a Flash Preloader using Actionscript 3 (AS3).
You can see a sample of the preloader here.
Read Dmode’s Flash Preloader in ActionScript 3 (AS3) post
March 27, 2008 – 10:27 am
Today, Adobe announced Photoshop Express, which as far as I can tell is like Flickr on steroids. It’s an online photo sharing RIA (rich internet application) and allows you to not only upload photos and create galleries, but also to do some minor photoshop-ish editing to those photos. The gallery on the home page looks [...]
I’ll start this post off by saying:
GIBSON GUITARS YOU ARE LAME! I’M GLAD I OWN AN IBANEZ!
I am so sick of people filing a patent and then just laying in wait to see if someone creates something that infringes on that so they can sue.
For example I just recently read this article about a [...]
Last week I had a weird thing happen. Firefox is my browser of choice, but I still use IE for testing and whenever I want to get really frustrated about css. Thus, I’m used to the normal weirdness that occurs when you jump from FF to IE to check a design, but I was surprised [...]
March 18, 2008 – 10:34 am
I recently read on Emmy Huang’s blog that there is a new security update coming out for Flash 9 that may affect existing swf content on the web. This Flash Player update will address some of the vulnerabilities that were discovered in December of last year.
For the most part it looks like there are easy [...]
One of my favorite things to do when creating a Flash site is to use random numbers to generate some fun randomization on the site.
You can create tons of cool randomness by generating a random number within a range. Here is the script I use. This is AS2 and AS3 friendly:
var high:Number = 10; [...]
March 16, 2008 – 10:00 pm
For this week’s Music Monday I took a tune by my buddy’s band Bleaog and threw down some DOPE lyrics over it. I could be wrong but I am pretty sure this is the first time Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman have ever been mentioned in a rap. I’m using the term “rap” very loosely [...]
March 14, 2008 – 12:16 pm
Music Monday on Friday! Hooray!
Listen to the song here:
You need Flash to listen to this
var so = new SWFObject(”http://www.jesseharding.com/blog/sotwPlayerAS2.swf”, “sotwPlayer”, “100″, “20″, “8″, “#FFFFFF”);
so.addVariable(”myURL”, “http://www.jesseharding.com/blog/music/MM5.mp3″);
so.write(”flashcontent4″);
March 14, 2008 – 11:46 am
Have you ever been working with a client, and they tell you the web site you are building looks funky in their IE5 800×600 browser? You immediately tell them that NO one is still using IE5 or 800×600, but they look at you with that unconvinced, skeptical or just confused daze.
Maybe I am just [...]
I checked out the PicLens, Firefox plug-in last week and WOW! It’s waaaaay cool! Basically it turns Google Images, Flickr, Photobucket or a few other photo sites into really cool, full-screen interactive galleries. Here is my review:
Pros:
The resolution/quality is amazing. They must have some sort of filter that sharpens the images because even small images [...]
Today I ran into a really weird bug in IE 7. I had done some CSS and HTML handed it off to our programmer to add to our site. My version worked in both Internet Explorer and Firefox, but once it got included into the asp code and added to the site, it looked funky [...]
March 10, 2008 – 10:04 am
Here is this week’s Music Monday. It’s a fun little tune. Like most of my others, it’s a little rough and ends abruptly.
Listen to the song here:
You need Flash to listen to this
var so = new SWFObject(”http://www.jesseharding.com/blog/sotwPlayerAS2.swf”, “sotwPlayer”, “100″, “20″, “8″, “#FFFFFF”);
so.addVariable(”myURL”, “http://www.jesseharding.com/blog/music/MM4.mp3″);
so.write(”flashcontent5″);
Hi, I'm Jesse Harding. I'm a designer from