Shifting pixels in flash is relaxing. I experimented a bit with turning Type into grains and use these grains to mess around. What came out doesn’t make too much sense in terms of usability. Nevertheless someone might find it useful in a preloader to gain the attention from a user for just a few seconds more. Depending on the settings the effect generates different results:

click here to turn lovely Wembley grass into a 4th division pitch.

click here to see what happened to Lehman, Merrill, Goldman, Morgan et. al.

click here for some bubbling pixels.

The code is not too exciting. Basically it (more…)

Here’s a little example of a ToggleButtonSkin that uses some effects to create a subtle chrome-impression when the button is selected.

The gradient is calculated from the backgroundColor-Style of the host component. Then in selected state some Tint and Animate effects are applied to the Strokes that make up the border.

Click here for the example. Needs flash player 10 (beta).

Here’s the source for the (more…)

Frequency Modulation was discovered by John Chowning back in the 60s, while experimenting with vibrato. Basically in FM-Synthesis the frequency of one oscillator (carrier) is modulated by the signal of another oscillator (modulator). The great thing about FM-Synthesis is that it can produce a wide range of sounds with relatively little computing cost, cause we only need to generate 2 basic waveforms to get started. Ideal for environments like flash where you have to watch your fps carefully.

Here’s a little test. Please turn down volume first. Needs the latest Flash-Player 10 (rc of 091508).

To do FM-Synthesis in flash we could fill the (more…)

Yet another byproduct of a drawPath() test. Think those little creatures look neat, so I posted them here. Click here. Needs Flash 10 (beta rc1).

Today I had a closer look at the new skinning architecture of Gumbo. Here’s a little example that uses a couple of custom slider components. This custom component extends the standard gumbo VSlider by composition and integrates custom skins. click here to see example. Needs flash player 10 (beta rc1).

The Gumbo VSlider expects (more…)

The past few days I was digging a bit into Gumbo (flex 4 beta). I was happy to see that flex 4 will take a lightweight approach regarding components. Components are stripped down to their most basic behavior and there’s now a clean separation between model, controller and view.

This, in combination with an enhanced state architecture and the newly integrated graphics tag library FXG, makes it a snap to create a custom look and feel in flex (especially when CS4 export or thermo integration will be ready)

Here is a little example of a GUI done in Gumbo (flex 4 beta) to wrap up my sound experiments done earlier.

click here. Needs the latest Flash-Player 10 (rc of 091508).

The GUI for the player is straight forward. It uses some FXG-Elements to (more…)

I’ve been playing a bit with the new drawPath() function in flash 10 beta. Handy little function that offers better performance compared to iterating over lineTo(), curveTo() etc. Here’s a little byproduct. Just a simple algorithm that draws a series of lowers. Needs flash player 10 (beta rc1).

click here. Needs flash player 10 (beta rc1).

In this post I was experimenting with waveforms. Playing sounds constantly on the same pitch gets a bit boring after a while, however simply introducing random pitch isn’t too charming either. I started to twiddle (more…)

It’s been quite a while (back in 2002, flash 5) since I did some serious work using oscillators and waveforms. I’m writing this down while trying to get back on track. The stuff described here is definitely no secret. It’s basic, but relevant to create some tunes in flash. Maybe you’ll find some of the stuff useful.

Through the introduction of the SampleDataEvent (more…)