Flashgamer

Adobe evangelist James Ward did a packed session at JavaZone in Oslo yesterday. There was hardly room to stand in the room, so Flex sure seems popular with the Java crowd. Tonight, he will visit Flash User Group Norway (FUGN) for an informal session about Flex - a rare chance for Norwegian Flex users to get some info directly from the source (and maybe grab a beer or some pizza as well?).

Unfortunately, I can't go there myself tonight, but I'm posting it here so others will know what's happening.

Posted by Jensa at 01:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just read about this Flash Player 10 test. Thought the cubes looked nice and wondered how Away3D stacked up using the current Flash Player 9 version. Plays pretty well? (Source)

Posted by Jensa at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

ExpressionEngine (EE) is the CMS system I use for Flashmagazine and other sites I build these days. While not related to Flash (as most of the content on this blog is), EE is a flexible way to create advanced websites fast. I review a lot of Flash related books for Flashmagazine and when asked by Packt Publishing to review a book about ExpressionEngine I felt that it could also be of interest to the Flash users reading this blog. Most of us build websites as part of our job and this book provides a basic introduction to a great CMS system.

There are not many books about ExpressionEngine. This is in fact the only book that's listed on Amazon that covers EE exclusively so that's certainly what one would call a competitive edge. The only other book that I'm aware of is Michael Boyink's PDF book that I've also read.

Continue reading "Review: Building websites with ExpressionEngine 1.6" »

Posted by Jensa at 09:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Mario just posted an extremely cool example of Peacock - the Pattern Generator in the Aviary suite. I can't help myself re-posting this as I love Lego's and this Peacock "filter" will let you take ANY image and have it built with 3x2 Lego blocks. It's amazing how powerful this online Flash based application has become, just check out the video below to see how it is done.

Plastic Block Fishy from mpeutz on Vimeo.

PS: I still have two more Peacock invites to the first commenters on this post :) Invites are now gone :)

Posted by Jensa at 10:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Going to Flash On The Beach? I'm so looking forward to this conference and I'm hoping that as many as possible will join in on the Flashburgers the day before the event! See you in Brighton!

(image courtesy of icanhascheezburger.com)

Posted by Jensa at 09:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's been a while since I've seen a really good and original Flash animation, but today I found one: There she is!! It's a beautifully drawn story about forbidden love. The timing is incredibly good and there's a lot of attention to detail despite the very simplistic style.

The team behind is three Korean artists calling themselves SamBakZa. The series started back on 2004 and up until now, four out of 5 episodes have been posted. The series has more than 7 million views on Newgrounds.com so it's certainly popular. They've also managed something few have done before them - out of 2747 reviews for Step 3 on Newgrounds, the average is 9.7 (out of 10) and Step 4 has an average of 9.8 out of more than 3000 votes! The story is cute, but full of action as well. Go check it out!

Posted by Jensa at 08:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Quite often, I do projects where I do the code and somebody else do the graphics. I usually set this up so that the designer can work in Flash CS3, whereas I do my code in Flex Builder. I set my class to be the Document Class and then set the FLA to not "Automatically declare stage instances" so I can reference the animators MovieClips inside my code.

Today I got an error that I've also gotten on a couple other occasions and I thought I'd blog the solution here for future reference.

This is the error:

ReferenceError: Error #1056: Cannot create property anim1 on Bynett.
	at flash.display::Sprite/constructChildren()
	at flash.display::Sprite()
	at Bynett()

By default, I usually set all properties in a class to "private". This error will occur if you set a MovieClip to "private" when it should have been "public". What happens is that since the MovieClip is set to private, the Flash CS3 environment won't have the required access to this clip. Just make sure that all objects that the designer will control is set to "public" and all is fine.

(Thanks to Kadazuro for reminding me of the solution!)

Posted by Jensa at 03:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)