Ok, as some of you know, I love Cheese. No, not the kind you eat (though that is good), this Cheese:

I linked back to the infamous “I pooted” commercial awhile back too. Anyway… It is October and the month for carving up your pumpkins! I thought I would give a go at creating Cheese Stencils for anyone that wanted to use them. If you use one, please shoot me a picture! I’d love to see your handy work.

UPDATE:
Here is my Cheese pumpkin.

Cheese from Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends Pumpkin Stencils:
Click on the image preview below for the big printable version(PDF).

I recently redesigned my professional portfolio/business site. There is not a lick of Flash now. Previously it was all Flash. I thought I’d mix things up a bit and go completely XHTML/CSS. I had it posted on CSSMania as well – if you get bored you can go and vote for me here. Just thought I’d share.

Visit Pixelfumes.com

**UPDATE: New Version here.

With Windows Vista coming out there is a lot of attention on the new UI and “glass”. In the picture above you can see through part of the window. It obviously is semi-transparent. Now that is easy enough to do in Flash – right? But what I noticed is that it also gives a slight blur to what is behind the window as well. That made me wonder – could the same be done easily in Flash?

What I have below here is a proof of concept of the technique. It uses the BitmapData class and the BlurFilter class. You can drag the little semi-transparent window around and even edit the text behind the window in real time. Adjust the amount of blur the window casts at the bottom. You can download the source here.

This currently isn’t in a class structure and could definitely be made a bit more efficient – but then again – this is web 2.0 – consider this beta. I would love to see if anyone makes anything cool with this so let me know. Hope you like it:

When I first saw this link I skipped over it because I thought it was something I had seen before – I was wrong. So, just in case you all have not had the chance to see this cartoon, here it is. It is extremely well done and gives you a humorous look at the last 10 years of Flash. Take a look at it over at Nectarine.

10th Anniversary of Flash Animation by Nectarine

I took some time to do my own demo/test of the new Fullscreen Capability that the new beta Flash 9 player has. You can see the effect below if you have the new player installed and a web cam. This was written in Flash 9 and uses a newer version of my AS3 Reflection Class (click here for old AS3 version – new to be released soon) to update the reflection live. For more info on the new feature and how to implement it you can check the links below:Get the latest Flash 9 Player to see the effect.Adobe : Flash Player:9:Update:Full-Screen ModeAdobe: Full-Screen Demos

Recently I was developing a CD-ROM using Flash. I was listening for an onSoundLoad event to be dispatched so that I could process some more code. The funny thing was that the event never seemed to fire. I thought that since it was in an AS2 class that maybe I was screwing something up while using the Delegate class. So, I tried a couple different things to check my “scope”. Luckily I stumbled upon this post over on Flashcoders:

http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/pipermail/flashcoders/2005-March/133677.html

It seems that the onSoundLoad event does not fire locally – this bug worked its way into my CD-ROM application since it was being run on the end-user’s machine and not in a web browser. So you ask yourself, “Self, what’s the fix?”. Glad you asked. Simply “preload” the sound by checking the getBytesLoaded() vs. getBytesTotal(). When they are the same or fully loaded – fire your own method call. Worked like a champ.

Some of you may already know about this but I thought I would post in case I was not the only one living under the onSoundLoad rock.

A new beta release of the Flash 9 Player has been released. It now supports the ability to go actual fullscreen from the browser. The beautiful thing is that it does so without the “chrome” (menubars, window buttons, etc) just as one might do from a CD-ROM application. Now, many are worried about the abuse of this feature – and granted there is some concern. But to those who wield the new power well a new world has been opened. I took a test drive on my ancient 600 MHZ laptop with 128MB of RAM. The link below played like a champ. Great Flash 9 Player performance – EVEN fullscreen. Take a look at the sample below over at flashguru.com. Hopefully I will have time to do my own soon. Obviously you need the new Flash 9b update – get it in the labs.

http://www.flashcomguru.com/apps/fullscreen_player9/fullscreen.html