Firstly, sorry for not posting for so long - I have been on holiday and am in the process of redesigning this site.

Now while I was away I received a comment from ‘MAD Chen’ asking for something on video in flash so today I’m going to show you how to build a simple custom video player in AS3.

There is always the ‘FLV playback component’ - it does lots of things for you, so a good general purpose tool, but it’s still more flexible to make a video player yourself. [...]

On Thursday I did I presentation for some TV weather professionals from other parts of China. I was asked to prepare a powerpoint show but, obviously, I chose to make a flash one instead (so I can show off and so that I don’t have to lower myself to having to learn any Microsoft shit).

I first created a background that, over the course of the presentation, fades from daylight colours into night-time colours. On top of that I overlayed a constant animated cloud sequence, entirely generated by ActionScript3 using random blurred shapes which move on each frame. Then I used some swish animations for the presentation of the actual information.

I thought I should upload it here mainly to share the idea and let you see how I did the clouds. The rest is actually rather messy because I was in a hurry. I have only included the first few ’slides’.

You can progress through the presentation by hitting SPACE BAR and you can make it full-screen by clicking the blue arrow button in the top left corner.

Cloud code:

import flash.display.*;
import flash.geom.Point;
import flash.events.Event;
 
var bitmap:BitmapData;
var angle:Number = 0;
var _offset:Number = 0;
var randomness:Number = (Math.random()*1000)+1000;
 
var pt:Point = new Point(10, 10);
bitmap = new BitmapData(stage.stageWidth,310,true,0x000000);
var image:Bitmap = new Bitmap(bitmap);
addChild(image);
addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME,loop);
 
function loop(e:Event):void
{
	var point:Point=new Point(this._offset,0);
	bitmap.perlinNoise(300,100,3,randomness,false,true,BitmapDataChannel.ALPHA,true,[point,point]);
	_offset+=2;
}

• presentation.zip(12.1MB)

Tags 标签 : AS3, cloud, clouds, flash, sky, 云，动画

I’ve just uploaded my recent publicity photos to flickr. They’re very cheesey - check out how much make up I have on. Hopefully my picture in next year’s weathergirls calendar will look better than this year’s!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dazsnow/sets/72157618164177771/

Tags 标签 : photos, publicity, weatherman, 宣传, 拍摄宣传照, 照片

Use the browser back and forward buttons to control your flash movie. See a demo video here!

One of the weaknesses of flash is to disrupt the browser navigation model. For example, if you click the back button then the user might expect to go back to the previous part of the flash movie but will instead be taken to the previous webpage. If they want to go back to the flash page they may have to reload it and renavigate to the part of the movie they were previously at. Users may also notice the address in the location bar doesn’t change when they navigate through the flash movie, which can possibly be confusing, breaking with user’s expectations… which is ALWAYS bad design.

You can test this using this simple flash movie I put together. Try navigating around the flash movie and then interacting with the browser controls - the stop / forward / back buttons.

Click to preview Flash movie

[...]

Tags 标签 : browser navigation, deep linking, interaction, swfaddress

I’ve been running this blog for 5 months now and would be very grateful for some feedback.

That which I’ve received so far is that the content is too technical for most readers and that the Chinese needs more work. [...]

Tags 标签 : feedback, marketing, 反馈, 营销