by Aaron
Load times are a Flash Developer’s nemesis. Even today with download speeds measured in megabits per second, a good developer has to be wary of how slow things are loading. A popular way of speeding up load times are to use a CDN like Cachefly or Amazon. However, these services do cost money and often charge by bandwidth used. An alternative way to speed up loading is to compress your files into a zip file.
(more…)
_Posted in Category==Null
by Nick
I know I’m not the first to delve into the world of Paper.js, but being such a new technology, i figured it was worth a look. Not to mention that you can do some pretty neat stuff with it on any canvas enabled browser.
See these quick examples:
cubes
lines
starfield
_Posted in Canvas, Category==Null, HTML5, Javascript
_Tagged Canvas, html, js, paper.js
by Aaron
Text and typography effects are all the rage right now. This example shows you what you can do when you can manually animate each individual letter. Manually splitting text fields for animations can be pretty annoying though. In this post I’ll show you how to split your text fields for use in animations.
(more…)
_Posted in Category==Null, Tutorial, flash
_Tagged actionscript, beginner, developer, splitify, text
by Nick
Now i know javascript frameworks are nothing new, and these two have been around for awhile now, but the JQuery vs Mootools debate still comes up quite often so I’d figure I’d share my reasoning for picking one over the other. It also seems like lately there has been a bit of a shift away from flash so javascript has become a more popular topic as of late. Another factor is the misconceptions of HTML5, a lot of what clients think HTML5 brings too the table, has already been possible with javascript frameworks. So lets get right into it shall we.
(more…)
_Posted in Category==Null, Javascript
_Tagged debate, Javascript, jQuery, mootools
by Mark
About 6 months ago we were contacted by a company in the uk because of this blog post. They were particularly interested in creating an html5 experience for the Bjork’s new web site. Who wasn’t? After Steve had this to say, and experiments like 100-tweets drummed up interest, the interwebs were ready to critically acclaim an html web experience and that’s when the wilderness downtown came onto the scene. It captured awards at the highest levels, and solidified the technology as a serious contender to deliver the highest quality web experiences – at least the marketing punch. When we saw the designs from m/m (paris), we got really excited. The mission: make it in ‘html5′ and it had to play nice on the iPad and iPhone. We knew this was going to be one of the most challenging projects we had worked on to date.
(more…)
_Posted in Canvas, Category==Null, HTML5, Javascript
by Aaron
3D is all the rage right now in the web. WebGL is finally becoming a reality and Adobe has also just released the low level 3d API, Molehill. However, both of these technologies are quite involved and aren’t really suited to quick and dirty 3d effects. This is where the flash10 3D, or maybe more accurately 2.5D, features came in. The idea here was to give developers the ability to do simple 3D effects by simply manipulating the properties of an object without having to resort to complicated and time consuming math.
(more…)
_Posted in Category==Null
_Tagged 2.5d, 3d, actionscript, Away3d, bugs, flash, MoleHill, papervision3d
by Mikko
There are two main problems that developers have face:
App stores really solve both of these issues. One of the coolest things as a web developer is the fact that there are ways to create “native” apps for these app stores using the standard languages we use: html, js, css, and AS3.
(more…)
_Posted in Category==Null, HTML5, Javascript, flash
by Mark
Recently we were engaged by a company in the UK and some designers based out of Paris, to bring a 3D model designed in Google SketchUp to life online. This would hardly be noteworthy had we been allowed to use Flash to deliver an interactive experience. But for this project, we were specifically tasked to use HTML5 friendly techniques. Thank you Mr. Jobs. Unfortunately, we can’t share any links at this time but we promise we will share once we launch. So what happens when you try to draw 8000+ lines on a canvas?
...snapshot of the "constellation" of lines and 'spheres'
_Posted in Canvas, Category==Null, HTML5
_Tagged canvas3d, google sketchup, jam3d
by Mark
As planned last week, the team turned our regular code review session into a 2 hr game development challenge. Basically we wanted to give team members the opportunity to flex some classes they don’t necessarily see on a regular basis. Deliberately we assigned developers with tasks they would have the least familiarity with. Another important goal of the exercise was focused on team communication. When working in tight deadlines within a team environment fluid communication between team members is paramount.
The timer had been set and the team broke into pairs. The paired teammates discussed their approach and generally speaking one team member per pair was at the keyboard while the other observed what was on screen.
Aaron and Sunil were charged with the sea mines. Nick and Mikko were working on the dock and general game framework. While Salpy and Michael worked on the sea itself.
What resulted after just a little over 2 hrs of development was a functional prototype that was tracing key game events. Really the game was less polished then everyone wanted to see it but in truth the objective had been met in a little over the allotted time. As much as i wanted to blow a whistle and pull the plug on the workstations a la Top Chef, a terrific vibe was present that felt too good to arrest.
The team is working on a tight deadline this week and probably into the next but there is a collective will to post the game once we’ve had a chance to give it that little TLC it needs.
Stay tuned!
_Posted in Category==Null