Hiddentrak

So Flash Player 10 has been released this morning and I’m sure there are a million posts/examples about all the new features. I think a small thing that is great from a designer’s point of view is the addition of ligatures into the text handling. These can add that extra level of detail that when used properly can make a design stand out.

Found this cool interface for Flickr by NYC design studio Bond Art + Science. Put up a demo of it for my photos and I really enjoy it. If you have some time head over to their website and also download the BlowUp files.

Just having a little fun with some of the Sound features available in Flash. Download source.

* Remember you will need to modify the source to point at your .mp3 file since I could not distribute the song.

One of my last projects at MLB Advanced Media was a Jabber powered chat client built in Flex. The interface consists of mxml components, several custom Flex components (like the crowd view), and some Flash content converted over to Flex with the Flex Component Kit.

It uses the as3 XIFF library to communicate with eJabberd, and at the time I had to make some modifications to the library to get it to successfully work. This is due to eJabberd’s strict implementation of the xmpp spec. It basically meant using the binary socket and fixing some of the packet structures. There are also several services that the client interfaces with, including some “bots” that can log in and out of chat to administer it and perform other tasks.

If you’re programming experience is primarily based in the world of Flash, you may not have had much exposure to regular expressions. With it’s inclusion in AS3, we now have some very powerful, and helpful tools available to us. I just wanted to post a quick snippet of how you might use regular expressions in your development.

[as]//regex that finds and replaces tokens in a string
function replaceTokens(str:String,paramObj:Object) : String{
//token structure ${tokenName}
var myRegEx:RegExp = /\$\{([a-zA-Z0-9]+)\}/g;
return str.replace(myRegEx,function(){return paramObj[arguments[1]]});
}[/as]

The regular expression we are concerned with is:
[as]var myRegEx:RegExp = /\$\{([a-zA-Z0-9]+)\}/g;[/as]

When this pattern is run against some input it matches the dollar sign, then an open brace, any letter or number and then a closing brace. Like so: ${exampleToken} The function we put together takes those matches and replaces the value with a match in the paramObj.

I was just fooling around with the curveTo method of the drawing API and some simple trig.

Click here or on the image to see it in action. You can drag the boxes too.