Marriage Proposals

I can’t decide which man I admire more: the guy behind the Bejeweled proposal or Richard Garfield.

Best FIVe3D Experiment Yet- Seriously, It’s Awesome

I’m pretty proud of this one…

AS3: BitmapData Foibles

Today I ran into what looks like an odd oversight in Adobe’s otherwise excellent BitmapData class. Alternatively, it could be an oversight in my otherwise excellent critical thinking skills. Neither is unheard of, but either way, someone is missing something somewhere.

FIVe3D and TweenLite: Text Cloud

I can’t seem to get enough of this FIVe3D thing. It’s even becoming natural to capitalize every letter except for that “e” when I write it. Not that I’m blinded to its faults, for there are a few here and there. But for quick 3D text rendering, I have yet to find its equal. Take today’s experiment, for example.

Experiments in the Third Dimension: FIVe3D

After some diligent research, I have compiled a list of things that impress me about Mathieu Badimon. He lives in Paris. He speaks at least two languages (that is, I assume he speaks French as well as English.) He has had at least one website on The Flash Website Awards. He apparently seems to understand exactly what the Flash community needs in a 3D engine.

Broadcasting Events from Custom MXML Components - The [Event] Tag

Okay, this was hard for me to wrap my brain around, so let me summarize, in case anyone else is stuck on this. When developing in Flex, all the standard components let you specify a listener when you create them in MXML, like this:

<mx:Button id="someButton" click="handleClick( event );"/>

Now when someone clicks on someButton, it […]

The Art and Beauty of Singletons

A) In poker, a card that is the only one of its rank.
B) In animal husbandry, the sole surviving offspring of a litter.
C) In astrology, a single planet alone in a hemisphere (or some crap like that).
D) In mathematics, a set with only one member.
E) In England, a small village about 7 miles north of Chichester in West Sussex.

What do all these things have in common?

Game Industry Map

The David Perry Game Industry Map has launched: link here. They claim to be tracking 10,000 organizations in 72 countries, so take a look around to see who’s in your neighborhood.

MXML Singletons in Flex 3

Okay, so I’ve been putting together a little image-viewer component in Flex, and I wanted it to load one data model that all other components would share. Sounds like a job for a Singleton, right? However, I also wanted to instantiate said model from MXML, which adds some kinks. In fact, I’ve heard it said that it’s not possible at all. And after some trial and error, I found that apparently it is possible- you just have to hack around a little bit.

Forward Kinematics in AS3

I must confess, firstly, that a week ago I didn’t know what forward kinematics were. Everyone seems to be talking about inverse kinematics lately (e.g. “ragdoll” physics), with no love at all for her sister, forward kinematics. And really, if such a thing may be said, forward kinematics is the hot sister- I’d take her over inverse anyday.