My pals Joe Kromer and WLinkin took my Seamless Background class and modified it to handle animation. Check it out:

http://joekromer.blogspot.com/2006/09/tiling-movie-clips.html

The BitmapData Class in Flash 8 is the rox0rs. All of my old Reflect classes use it. They also all use the “draw” method. This allows you to take a snapshot of a movie clip, write it to a bitmapData object and do whatever you want with it. Basically this class just takes out the hassle of creating the bmpData object and creating the movieclips. This is a real simple class and not so much a “wow” and more of a fast “save you some time” class. More for those of you that don’t like messing with any of that who-ha and just want to take… (drumroll) … a snapShot .Basically you pick a movieclip on your stage – let’s pretend it has an instance name of bob_mc.ss = new SnapShot(bob_mc);You have to target a movie clip to display the snapshot in. We have one called target_mc.ss.showSnapShot(target_mc);There it is! Now you can remove it too:ss.removeSnapShot();
Here is the class:
As a note, and after using the class a bit I thought it would be nice to be able to control and overwrite the snapShots. You can modify the class easily by changing the constructor and adding a takeSnapShot method like this:function SnapShot(m:MovieClip){ mc = m; bmp = new BitmapData(m._width,m._height,true,0xFFFFFF); } public function takeSnapShot(){ bmp.draw(mc); }

iTunes 7 was released today. You can download it at www.itunes.com. Loads of UI changes including the addition of CoverFlow. CoverFlow was only available on Mac OS X 10.4 and up until today! CoverFlow was a project created by Steel Skies and located at http://www.steelskies.com/coverflow/ for album art visuals. It now works on a PC too . CoverFlow was integrated as a view into iTunes 7 (screenshot above).

Another new feature is free album art. If you have an iTunes account you can download album art for the songs in your library missing art. This kills the need for my iTunes Album Art application. I was working on version 2 but stopped as of today.

Check it out if you get a chance. Very nice update imho.

This page will only work correctly in IE5+. Hope you enjoy!

Just for giggles I thought I would attempt to recreate the effect from the Flash version of the Modal Desaturation post I did.

Visit here: http://www.pixelfumes.com/blog/sep06/modalSaturation.html or click the image above.

This page will only work correctly in IE5+. Hope you enjoy!

I saw the sweet Flex2/Flash 9 version of the “Fade to Gray Modal Window Flex Effect” by Alistar McLeod on the Adobe Consulting blog and really enjoyed it. I thought I would give it a whirl in Flash 8 using a desaturation formula I dug up on chattyfig. I used the same sort of interface as Alistar for some continuity – nice effect Alistar. Thanks for the idea.You can get the source here.