Articles

  • Using Adobe Flex & PHP together with Zend AMF

    There are a variety of methods we can use to communicate between flash and our server side web applications, including XML and HTTP POST/GET. However a much more robust methods exists–Action Message Format (AMF). AMF uses binary encoded messages. Because of this the messages are compressed which makes AMF the fastest way to transfer data.…

  • Character animation using inverse kinematics in flash

    Adobe Flash CS4 has made character animation in Flash a lot easier. The following post shows an example of using Inverse Kinematics and the bone tool to animate a skeleton character. Firstly we need to divide all of the limbs of the character into movie clips. A photoshop document version of the character can be…

  • Crawling the web with PHP

    The internet is full of web spiders (also known as robots). The biggest and most powerful web spider is probably googlebot, google’s web spider, responsible for crawling the web, looking for new web pages to index, and checking if pages already in it’s index have been updated. This post shows how we can use PHP…

  • Papervision3D Basics

    Papervision 3D is a powerful open source 3D library for Flash. It allows us to create animations and interactive applications in 3D. The current release of Papervision 3D supports Actionscript 3 and can be downloaded here. This post runs through some of the basics of setting up an Actionscript 3 papervision 3D project.

  • Turning a photo into a sketch

    In this post we are going to explore one method of manipulating a photo to look like it has been sketched by pencil. We will use Adobe Photoshop.

  • Audio books from blog posts

    Sometimes it is convenient to listen to a book in audio format rather than to read it. This way we can take advantage of driving, cooking or exercise time to listen to books. This technique is also useful for reading technical documents, blog posts or other articles with little emphasis on graphics.

  • Using PHP with Google’s Language API

    Google hosts a terrific Ajax language Application Programming Interface (API), which allows developers to integrate Google’s translate.google.com service into their own applications. We don’t have to use the Ajax API in order to take advantage of this service. Google allow access to the API via url calls–supplied with GET or POST url variables. Please click…

  • Fixing Broken Websites with Greasemonkey

    Sometimes a website doesn’t function correctly. Even if a website works fine we may want it to display or perform differently. With a few web development and javascript skills we can change a website for ourselves using the Greasemonkey Firefox extension.

  • Adding colour to a black & white photo

    This post reveals one method of adding colour to a black and white photograph with photoshop. We use a harbour side shot taken in the 1930’s. Of course we don’t know exactly what colour might have been present when this shot was taken so we have to use some artistic licence in order to reproduce…

  • Recursive iteration through Display Objects – Flash

    NOTE: Please click here for a HTML DOM version of this technique. Sometimes it is useful to be able to iterate through our entire display list–or all of the display objects within a specific display object container–and either perform an operation on each object or access a property of each object. We need to use…