Wassim Sidani

Flash CS4 new features

wassim — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 07:34:16 +0000

Adobe recently announced Flash CS4, with great new features the flash community has been asking for, I had the chance the see the full package and I was impressed of the implementation of inverse kinematics, reminded me of moho’s (now anime studio) bones layers although moho’s offered much more options and flexibility, flash’s implementation is however dynamic i.e. we can script the bones and there’s a whole set of AS3 APIs for this purpose.

3D is also a much awaited feature yet papervision3D and alternative3D as well as other packages have much more than what adobe has to offer and are open source which make me wonder why adobe has not simply acquired and integrated one of these packages…

Again I feel that adobe is slowly but steadily removing the carpet from under the feet of AS2 developers, as I speculated, there’s no access to these goodies from within AVM1 i.e. AS2 is retiring in the eyes of the flash team and unless someone comes with some ingenious way to keep AS2 “hip and cool”, all of us AS2 guys will have to make the switch into the bitter AS3 beast with its unfriendly compiler that keeps yelling at you even you write one line of straight forward code…

One depressing find out is that RTL is not supported in static text fields, only in dynamic and input text fields with exotic ligature turned on.

A quick way to detect Idleing in flash actionscript 2

wassim — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 01:20:30 +0000

So I had this customer who asked me to do an flv player for his site, he wanted the controls of the player to fade out when the user is idle, now flash does not have an onIdle event of any kind and the only way around this was to trigger a signal when the mouse kept its position (did not move) for more than 3 second (or x seconds, customizable) or keys has not been pressed for x seconds.

Again, flash does not have an onMouseStill event so I had to do it this way:

this.onMouseMove=function(){ clearTimeout(toInt); fadeControlsIn(); toInt=setTimeout(fadeOut,3000);


}

function fadeOut(){

//fading out code goes here…

}

function fadeControlsIn(){

/fading in code goes here….

}

A similar approach can be applied to keypresses.

Hope this helps.

A year has passed…

wassim — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:22:19 +0000

I read this quote on a site and immediately remembered a student of mine who passed away last year in July, here’s what it says:

“Nous partirons l’un après l’autre, et ceux qui restent porteront la mémoire de ceux qui ont disparu.”

Which means:

We leave one after the other, those who remain hold the memory of those who passed away.

Indeed, we still remember you, Nadim…

Our chicks are leaving the nest…

wassim — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:20:04 +0000

Yes, another scholastic year has passed, a new wave of our beloved teen students graduated, they are out in the wild now getting ready for the big deal!

Leen, Ali, Mohammad, Sally, Dima, Rania and the lovely Lara are now out of the nest they are flying on their own, I will miss you all.

Hear me out guys, the fun has just began! Enjoy yourselves, learn and get out of there as soon as you can.

Flash player 10 and RTL support

wassim — Fri, 16 May 2008 09:36:36 +0000

Big news, flash player 10 beta supports complex text layouts and namely support for RTL languages like Arabic! At last, more info here : http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/demos/videos/text.html

There are many other features added like CPU surfacing and GPU compositing as well as enhanced drawing API and native 3D support yet the RTL support is something we’ve been waiting for long time, finally it has arrived! Thx Adobe, let’s hope it works as advertisied.

Left trim and right trim actionScript functions

wassim — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 05:56:33 +0000

Left trim and right trim actionScript functions
These useful functions (lTrim and rTrim) are available in almost all programming languages yet not in actionScript, so here’s how to write ones yourself:
lTrim is easier, so we’ll start with that:

PLAIN TEXT

Actionscript:

function lTrim(txt:String):String {
while
(txt.charAt(0)==" "
||txt.charAt(0)=="\t"
|| txt.charAt(0)=="\n"
|| txt.charAt(0)=="\r"
) {
txt=txt.substring(1,txt.length-1);
}
return txt;
}
//usage example:
trace(lTrim(" here's a text to trim"));// outputs : here's a text to trim

Pretty much straight forward, the function accepts a string as argument and returns a string, it checks whether the first character is a space, tab, or newline character and simply cuts it out and runs the same check on the resulting substring until there are no white spaces left at the leftmost end of the string.

Now for the slightly harder rTrim function,

PLAIN TEXT

Actionscript:

function rTrim (txt:String):String {
while (txt.charAt(txt.length-1)==" " ||txt.charAt(txt.length-1)=="\t" || txt.charAt(txt.length-1)=="\n" || txt.charAt(txt.length-1)=="\r"){
txt=txt.substring(0,txt.length-1);
}
return txt;
}
trace(rTrim ("rtrim this please \n\r ")+"delimiter");//outputs : rtrim this pleasedelimiter

The logic is very similar, feel free to use these wherever you like.
I would recommend using these as part of a class for string manipulation.
Btw, these functions are AS2 and AS3 compatible.

One More reason to hate Microsoft!

wassim — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 21:30:45 +0000

Like many of you outlook express users, I got an email today informing me that outlook express will no longer be able to access hotmail accounts beyond June 30 because the geniuses at Microsoft have invented what they think is a better protocol and outlook doesn't support it so they had to come up with a new "magnificent" piece of shit called Windows Live Mail. Why not upgrade outlook express? Well they say it will take a lot of work to add support to the good old outlook express…As if making a new program from scratch is easier! Do they take us for fools or something? Well maybe so and for a reason, we still are using there OS!

Like a dumb ass, I believed this crap and went straight to the download page, installed and fired the application to be saluted by a crash, hmmm, typical Microsoft first run behavior.

Restarted the application and watched it at work, it seems it's using the same engine as outlook with the sole difference that it crashes every 3 to 5 minutes or so, well, Now I know why they had to put outlook aside, because it works and they simply can't withstand the idea of having an application or even an operating system that works without killing it for the sake of shitty new applications no one really wants or prefers over the existing ones…

Having that said, I am seriously considering switching to Linux, the knoppix compilation is really cool and I am waiting for the Linux version of Adobe flash to switch permanently to Linux, if anyone knows a way I can start using flash on a Linux, plz drop me a line.

paypal enabled mini mp3 player

wassim — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 09:35:50 +0000

An XML driven slick mp3 player with playlist support and paypal as payment gateway, the look and feel is clean crisp and WEB2.0.

The player displays album art and a nice spectrum analyzer animation and comes with two skins, the black and white ones.

Here's a preview of the players, click to see them in action:

actionScript AS2 (typewriter) text effect

wassim — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 12:38:31 +0000

I needed a typewriter text effect with a twist for an mp3 player I was making, looked around and could not find one that suits my needs so I wrote this class, should do the job.

PLAIN TEXT

Actionscript:

/*
@author = Wassim Sidani
@www.sidani.info
usage example:
var tE:TxtEff=new TxtEff(textFieldInstance, textToWrite, delay);
textFieldInstance= a reference to a text field.
textToWrite= the actual text that will be typed in the text field.
delay = dealy in milliseconds before writing next character;
*/
class TxtEff extends TextField
{
function TxtEff (me, txt, delay)
{
//clearInterval(myInt);
//clearTimeout(myOtherIn);
myClass=this;
inite (me, txt, delay);
}
function inite (me, txt, delay)
{
var j : Number = 0;
chars = ['$', '!', '"', '#', '$', '%', '&', "'", '(', ')', '*', '+', ',', '-', '.', '/', '0', '1', '2', '3', '4', '5', '6', '7', '8', '9', ':', ';', '<', '=', '>', '?', '@', 'A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F', 'G', 'H', 'I', 'J', 'K', 'L', 'M', 'N', 'O', 'P', 'Q', 'R', 'S', 'T', 'U', 'V', 'W', 'X', 'Y', 'Z', '[', '\\', ']', '^', '_', '`', 'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'i', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm', 'n', 'o', 'p', 'q', 'r', 's', 't', 'u', 'v', 'w', 'x', 'y', 'z', '{', '|', '}', '~', ' '];
var initialText : String = txt;
for (k = 0; k length; k ++)
{
me.replaceText (k, k + 1, '-');
}
var myInt : Number = setInterval (go, delay, me);
function go (me)
{
//trace('goo is called and me.text ='+me.text);
if (j length)
{
//trace('j is ' + j+" and chars.length is "+chars.length);
for (var i = 0; i length; i ++)
{
if (initialText.charAt (j) == chars [i])
{
me.replaceText (j, j + 1, chars [i]);
j ++;
break;
}
}
} else
{
clearInterval (myInt);
trace ("done j=" + j);
//myOtherIn=setTimeout(myClass.inite,3000,me,txt,delay);
}
}
}
}

Flash shopping cart

wassim — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 10:51:03 +0000

The best flash shopping cart you've ever seen!

The flash cart supports multiple categories of products; it is driven by XML or a mySQL database.

The flash shopping cart was designed with usability in mind, it loads and is ready to go in less than 10 seconds! Faster than html or php based carts!

User friendly, highly flexible, lightweight (around 120 kb!) and a cool web 2.0 design are not the whole deal, there's more, a lot more!

Seamless paypal integration, the purchase is itemized and you get to see the details about each item in the paypal interface.

The merchant paypal account is easily customizable; you can set the paypal address, currency, thankYouUrl and cancelUrl.

The mySQL version is equipped with an admin panel that makes cart management, including thumbs and full size pictures upload a breeze even to non techy users.

This flash shopping cart is robust, it supports a variety of formats, can display jpg, png, gif and even swf pictures (both thumbnails and sull size pictures) of your products. It's simply an all-in-one solution.

A demo of this flash shopping cart is available here.