rendermouse blog

If life was more like Flash...

function dealWithIt(){
    if (stress) {
       crap.sort();
    }
}

function oops(){
    if (this == fubar) {
        myActions.prevFrame();
    }
}

function clarity(){
    brain.gotoAndPlay(1);
}

function embarrassmentHandler(){
    me._visible = false;
}

function betterPlace(){
    for (i=0; i<population.length; i++){
       population[i].greed --;
    }
}

Dali meets Disney: Destino

I saw "The Triplets of Belleville" the other day...and they showed the short film "Destino" before it. "Destino" is a piece started by Walt Disney & Salvador Dali for inclusion in the "Fantasia" movies...but was abandoned when the first "Fantasia" movie was not financially successful. (There is a brief reference to it in the "Fantasia 2000" movie)

Recently, Roy Disney decided to finish this project. It is really amazing to see.

See some footage:
You can view some short video clips online, linked from an article at npr.org.

You know, it would be really cool if a bunch of Flash folks online did animation projects to classical music, and we could string them all together in a Fantasia sort of way online. Like we all have the free time to do that kind of thing...

eLearning Flash Developer's Symposium next month

I just saw this online and thought I'd spread the word. There is an elearning Flash Developer's Symposium in Boston, April 19-21.

More info is available at elearningguild.com.

Session #2 in the Agenda reads like my job description. I designed, built & maintain the Flash-based eLearning engine & content editing tools we use at work. I guess people solve common problems using common solutions...

XHTML & Flash

After doing some tinkering with XHTML today, I realized that you can load valid XHTML pages right into the Flash XML object, since XHTML is in fact a standard XML file (as long as it's well-formed). For all I know, this was obvious to everyone else but me. I haven't worked much with XHTML.

I had seen the Flash-based DENG XHTML browser before, but didn't know much about how it worked.

I just thought it was cool that you can load any XHTML-compliant webpage code right into Flash using a standard XML.load, and with a quick .toString() command, toss it into any HTML-enabled text field in your movie. I guess you would be subject to the same security issues as loading other XML files, but just testing my movie from the IDE lets me load the www.xhtml.org homepage as an XML object with no problem.

You could load normal HTML with LoadVars, too, but now you have an XML object, so you could parse through the nodes within the content if you needed to.