AS3 and Flex2 Seminars

I've just returned from Aral Balkan's "Hot Shots" seminars in London, and I have to say "Wow". I wasn't quite sure how much I'd get out of an intensive course, but I'm very glad I went.

As any LondonMMUG attendee will tell you, Aral's enthusiasm is always contagious. In these seminars he managed to convey a lot of information in a very manageable manor, and with some excellent real-world examples. The days were well paced, and full of Adobe-app goodness. If you get the chance to attend any future HotShot seminars, I would highly recommend doing so :)

So long Cambridge Uni!

For the last 14 months I have been on a rolling contract with Cambridge University. My girlfriend and I now wish to move to Bath, and so I've just handed in my resignation.

I'm going to take some time out before looking for work again (I plan to look in to Actionscript3 and Flex2 first). We've also considered working abroad, and so if anyone in Australia, Europe, Canada... is looking for an AS2 developer, feel free to get in touch! I would consider settling in to a permanent position if the location is right :)

Mixing HTML/CSS & Embedded Fonts

I get a lot of questions about font problems when using markup in Flash - as I was answering a forum thread this evening I thought it was about time I posted something to the blog - so here's a copy of my reply :)

There are a couple of things to be aware of when you're mixing HTML/CSS and embedded fonts.
Think of how normal HTML pages work - HTML doesn't embed fonts, it utilises what fonts the user has on his/her computer, which is why you need to specify a family of possible fonts in your CSS file - if the client's machine doesn't have one of them, it will use another one from the family instead.

Now think about what you may be trying to do in Flash. Flash does support HTML text, but if you embed a font in a Flash textbox you are telling it to use that font and that font only. If you then apply CSS which specifies a "font-family", you are giving Flash conflicting instructions - you are saying "Use this particular embedded font ..oh, and here's a choice of fonts to use as well". Poor old Flash gets confused. The result? It will usually display nothing at all. To get around this problem either do not specify a font-family in your CSS at all, or if you really want to specify a font-family, the *only* name in it must be the name of the embedded font.

For the same kind of reasons as mentioned above, normal HTML pages can easily display the normal, bold or italic version of a particular font together in one TextField. However, when you embed a font in Flash you usually choose to embed the normal version only - the bold and italicised versions are not embedded and so will not show up when you have HTML mark-up specifying bold or italicised text amongst normal text.

This is a bit of a problem because [to my knowledge] Flash is only designed to allow you to specify one embedded font per TextField. However, there is a workaround...

First, you embed the font you want to use, in the usual way. Next, create a couple of TextFields somewhere on the main timeline at author-time. In one, manually embed the bold version of that desired font (ie embed the font and then click the "B" button on the properties bar). In another, embed the italic version. Now you can have HTML mark up which displays normal, bold and italic text all in one box (note: you do not need to associate the bold and italic text with any particular TextField).
I hope this helps :)

I was recently asked if it was possible to create (CSS) styles within the IDE, and use them with an embedded font. Yes you can. The Flash dictionary is not very helpful so here's a quick example that will work for a Flash 7 movie:

/*requires a font in the library set to export with the linkage "myFont"*/
var myStyle:TextField.StyleSheet = new TextField.StyleSheet();
myStyle.setStyle(".testStyle",{fontFamily:'myFont',
textAlign:'center',
color:'#992299'});
this.createTextField("bob", 500, 50, 50, 100, 100);
bob = this["bob"];
bob.autoSize = "left";
bob.styleSheet = myStyle;
bob.html = true;
bob.embedFonts = true;
bob.border = true;
bob.multiline = true;
bob.wordWrap = true;
bob.text = "<span class='testStyle'>asdasdasdsadas</span>";

Note: Don't call your style 'style' - it can cause unexpected problems down the line.

MERRY XMAS!

Excellent Ikea site with that multi-angle Matrix camera effect

Both new Flash 8 tutorials have now been translated in to Chinese (thanks to egoldy at webstudio)

bitmapdata
maelstrom

New Flash 8 BitmapData class tutorial
I have just uploaded another new Flash 8 tutorial. This one is about the BitmapData class.

Studio 8 Release - announcement from Macromedia
www.macromedia.com/software/studio/
Estimated Availability Date 12 September 2005

Flash 8 tutorial
There is a new Flash 8 (Maelstrom) tutorial, now uploaded to the tutorials section of this website.

It is, as yet unchecked (the best time to write a tutorial is perhaps not at 4-6am in the morning, when you've been up all night with chronic ear ache, and consumed a heady mixture of red wine and Ibuprofen to help dull the pain ... but still! Hopefully it will be coherent).

It includes links to the source code from both the filters and bitmap-scrambling example flas (see post below).

Also, keep an eye on that particular post, as I hope to add additional links to it in the near future.

Night/Morning,
Neil

Flash 8
The Flash 8 beta player was released a short while ago.
Here, have some F8 stuff!(more to follow)

Copy and paste, straight from bitmap!
scramble bitmap data

Oh no, not a mouse trailer! Yes, but using bitmap screenshots, bitmap caching and blur filters (may still not look too good on slower machines)
bitmap trail

Simple blending mode example
blending modes

Great to see some forums are on the ball too. Check out this Flash 8 beta thread at Kirupa.com :)

update: the newest beta player version is: WIN 8,0,5,0
Get it here!

It's a £77 million Euro-lottery jackpot tomorrow. I thought I'd let Flash do the choosing for me...
EURO MILLIONS NUMBER GEN

My girlfriend and I have just come back from a holiday in Cancun Mexico (Amazing place, but we unwittingly chose the week that hurricane Emily struck!) Maybe our luck will change for the better :)

ps if you use it and win, remember me!
Your *best* friend,
Neil

;)