Posted By wassim in Flash
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.
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Posted By wassim in Flash, Flash Tutorials
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.
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Posted By wassim in Education/Teaching, Wassim
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…
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Posted By wassim in Education/Teaching, Wassim
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.
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Posted By wassim in Flash
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.
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