Monday, October 30, 2006
I've just tried a new service called MediaFire so that I can share large files with clients/friends which I think will be incredibly useful. This particular site only launched a couple of weeks ago but it seems like they are onto a winner. I particularly like the painless AJAX (or whatever) registration which means you never leave the homepage and it is done in seconds. Once you upload a file you are given the url or if you prefer you can email it to your contact. Simple, but very clever!Jon 12:14 PM Permalink
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
I have always been a fan of tweening classes in Flash, I think the first one I ever used was Zeh Fernando's MCTween years ago when it was but a mere prototype... Then I moved on to lmc_tween Class until I settled on the built in Tween class which was as then undocumented, but some clever flash guru found it lurking in the classes directory! This tween class has been fairly good to me for some time but there's always been one thing that has bugged me which is the lack of support for chaining Tween's together and callback functions. I have had a lot of unsightly code which has setInterval's calling functions to call new tweens which is not good!Today was a breakthrough for me, I finally gave FuseKit a go, and seeing as it is the official update to the lmc_tween class it feels immediately familiar and has the support for callback functions and delays as did the original.
By far the most interesting feature which I have been using today is Fuse, the animation sequencer. With Fuse it is simple to chain a set of tweens either for 1 object or multiple objects and you can group tweens together so you can perform multiple tweens on 1 object before moving onto the next object in the sequence. This is exactly what I have been looking for! I feel that I have only really started to scrape the surface of what is possible with FuseKit as it also has support for Flash 8 filter tweening too. I can highly recommend it to anyone looking for the ultimate Tween class.
Jon 3:20 PM Permalink
Monday, October 23, 2006
I found my first effort a little boring so I built a new one, this time as can be seen on my homepage it just uses a cropped strip of the album artwork of the latest albums I've been listening to with a click through to the relevant last.fm profile page. I much prefer this one as it isn't necessarily obvious what the album is.Jon 10:04 AM Permalink
Friday, October 20, 2006
Just a quick note Rate My Drawing has moved to its' own domain http://www.ratemydrawings.com. There is currently a Halloween competition running with some cool entries so far, just have a look at these!. Have a go to be in the running for a copy of 'ToonBoom Studio Express'.Jon 5:29 PM Permalink
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Ok much as I love making flash widgets for my website I think I am verging on turning freaksauce into a mySpace site, but for now I have added my new last fm widget which randomly cycles through my most recent weekly track chart, each track links through to the relevant last fm profile page. I am also working on one that displays artwork too and might just revert to art only at some point...Jon 10:17 AM Permalink
I have just optimised a bit of php on my homepage which I think could have been slowing the page load, it was a stupid error really I am using magpierss to grab the feed from my blogger xml file and I noticed that I was doing 2 seperate loads of the xml file and creating 2 seperate arrays in the page to create the most recent article and then previous posts instead of just saving the lot in one array and using unset to remove the first item in my second loop. You live and learn...
Jon 9:49 AM Permalink
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
I'm usually a sucker for a good social networking web 2.0 betalicious api touting web application but when it came to last fm I just didn't really get it at first. I know my brother has been scrobbling since its inception and quite a few of my past workmates are into it too but I've never seen te fascination with it... until yesterday. Now I couldn't get the username freaksauce as I have previously mentioned otherwise I would have joined sooner, not that I'm bitter... that thieving little teenage $%!^!! Ok so once I got over the heartbreak I finally signed up using my actual name! crazy...Ok so now the real reason I signed up... it gives me an excuse to build a new flash widget using their xml feeds and seeing as I haven't added to freaksauce for a while it also gives me something to write about! I only started it last night and its well on the way so if I get some time later on tonight I'll try and get a v0.1 up on the front page.
Jon 8:58 AM Permalink