June 01, 2009
Flight of the Hamsters for iPhone
Flight of the Hamsters is out for the iPhone. I worked on the original Flash version for CartoonNetwork.com, so it's cool to see it reach a wider audience. I didn't do any of the iPhone development, but they seem to have kept everything exactly as it was in the original, including my favorite part: the Wagner classical soundtrack I wanted playing behind the game.
May 12, 2009
currentLabel thinks frame comments are labels in Flash CS4
Some folks like to put comments in their Flash timelines. They create label names like "// this is a comment".
There could be an additional layer for actual frame labels, used to tell the clip "gotoAndPlay(labelName)".
If you try to access these label names through code, you'll get different results in CS3 and CS4.
In Flash CS3, if both a comment and frame label are present, currentLabel always returns the correct frame label.
in Flash CS4, if the comment layer is BELOW the frame label layer, the currentLabel property returns the comment instead of your desired frame label.
May 06, 2009
PDFBook 3D
Today I ran across pdfbook 3D via FlashDen.
At first I was wondering whether this made reading documents online better or worse. The thing is, it depends on the content.
There are many catalogs/magazines that truly know how to design for the 2-page spread. A big, wide grouping of related items can better draw the viewer's interest, such as a full living room photo shoot instead of a grid showing tables and lamps. You can't get that same big grouping feel from a PDF that a user might be viewing one portrait page at a time.
PDFBook 3D could give catalog and magazine designers a way to repurpose their print material for the web, while delivering a viewing experience very similar to the original material.