Nearing completion of AIR application – call for beta testers.

August 27th, 2009

OK so in my journey into working freelance as a flash developer / designer, one thing that has bothered me is the type of invoicing / billing software available out there, you either need intensive training to get to grips with some of the software, and quite honestly, I can’t spare the time or it just isn’t versatile enough and one of the great things with what we do and also with Adobe AIR is the fact that we can easily do something about it, so that is what I did.

So my aim was firstly to create something that I could use myself in order to invoice clients not just in my own currency but in other currencies, as my client base is pretty much world wide, as well as being able to produce invoices and accounts that were easy to manage. So I have over the last few months – in my spare time, been developing a software package that can handle invoicing / billing / reports and also timing of projects.

Since firstly creating a basic package for myself to use I decided to develop it further as I thought that if it has been useful to me then surely somebody else may want to use it, right? So my main purpose was firstly to make it as simple and easy to use as possible as well as being versatile. It has only been tested by myself and seems to be pretty robust, but in order for it to be really tested before I actually release it I need it to be tested by other people.

So I have decided to ask you my loyal reader base, if any of you would be interested in vigorously testing it for me before I generally release it on Adobe market place. My intention is to always release the software as free so monetary gain is not intended, and any beta testers will be thanked in the release version. So if you are interested please do get in touch with me either by leaving a comment or via here.

Categories: Actionscript 3.0, Adobe, Adobe AIR | Tags: , , | 8 Comments

Animating text fields with Actionscript

March 11th, 2009

The Flash plugin is required to view this object.

Well after a little period of no posts due to being insanely busy, I thought I would share a little technique I discovered through trial and error and a little thought. Ever wanted to tween individual letters from a text field with AS3 rather than on the time line in flash? Well it is incredibly easy!
Firstly you need to create your text in the Flash authoring tool, and then after adding the text field to a container MovieClip or Sprite you simply break it apart once so that the text is separated.
Once this is done either on the main timeline or in your document class you can target the texts by targeting the container sprite's children with getChildAt(); during a for loop:

PLAIN TEXT
Actionscript:
  1. function startAnim():void
  2. {
  3.     for(var j:uint = 0; j <textHolder.numChildren; j++){
  4.         obArray[j] = textHolder.getChildAt(j);
  5.     }
  6.     for(var i:uint = 0; i <obArray.length; i++){       
  7.         holderArray[i] = new MovieClip();
  8.         addChild(holderArray[i]);
  9.         holderArray[i].addChild(obArray[i]);
  10.         holderArray[i].z = -5000;
  11.         holderArray[i].x = 1068;
  12.         holderArray[i].y = 68;
  13.         holderArray[i].filters = [blur, drop];
  14.     }
  15. }

You can then add the children to their own individual container sprite as you can see and then target that sprite in order to transform any property, including filters and its stage position.

PLAIN TEXT
Actionscript:
  1. function next(e:TimerEvent):void
  2. {
  3.     timer.stop();
  4.     timer.removeEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, next);
  5.     addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, loop);
  6.     for(var i:uint = 0; i <holderArray.length; i++){
  7.         var delayTime:Number = Math.random()*4;
  8.         var tween1:GTween = new GTween(holderArray[i], .8,{y: -500,
  9.                             delay: delayTime},{ease:Bounce.easeOut});
  10.     }
  11.     timer =  new Timer(4000, 0);
  12.     timer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, init);
  13.     timer.start();
  14. }

Cue another spate of crappy banner ads.......!!!

Get the source here.

Categories: Actionscript 3.0, Text | Tags: , , | 1 Comment

UltraVisual lab finally up and running

February 4th, 2009

Finally I have managed to find the time to start my lab page, where I will be able to post any experiments or ideas I may have, who knows some of it may be useful, some will probably not, anyway take a look, I have already posted a couple of things I have been messing around with.

UltraVisual Lab

Categories: News | Tags: , , , | 1 Comment