CU3ER v1 is released

What’s New?

Transitions Step away from common, boring & flat 2D experience and dive into endless possibilities of adding the third dimension to your slideshow with grid slicing, simple fade or slide, full or half-flip transitions, transition order, direction and much more. cManager Forget about XML! Let’s talk about the real joy – cManager! Create and manage your CU3ER like a PRO with our awesome, robust yet easy to use online application. Interactive workflow, rich GUI, timeline, live preview – set, create & export CU3ER within minutes. Shadows You are now able to simulate more natural environment for your 3D slideshow by deploying one of two available shadow types: static (image) or dynamic (live). Either way it’s an awesome practice to enhance CU3ER slideshow. Camera Push your CU3ER 3D look even further by setting 3D position and rotation of your slides. Additional gem is ‘lens’ option where you can simulate camera lens distortion like ‘fish-eye’. Thumbnails We like to call it ‘Advanced Thumbnails’. And they are indeed. Grid distribution, horizontal scrolling, vertical scrolling, custom scroll bar, thumb image, captions, numbering, round corners… Projects Considering yourself serious about your web design profession? We have provided you extensive control panel for creating, modifying and managing CU3ER projects across assigned domains. API Now you can sync or communicate with CU3ER and rest of your page elements with easy and simple functions. Play or pause slideshow, navigate trough slides or listen to CU3ER events. Playback Control Manage and control CU3ER playback with auto-play, slide duration, looping, starting slide, randomize and other options. Awesome for creating timely controlled animations like web banners. Layout You are allowed to configure almost every aspect of your slideshow layout. It’s so easy to manage perfect blend between CU3ER and your web page – is that what is this all about? Branding Management Custom positioning of CU3ER logo is available trough branding options. You can even turn off CU3ER branding if your boss finds us boring! Support Stack with something or looking for particular solution for your CU3ER problem? We have enabled you a couple of support channels you can use in order to solve your CU3ER problem.

and much, much more …

New CU3ER coming out soon!

You might know already that Stefan Kovac and me formed new company called MADEBYPLAY. We are very excited to work on new release of CU3ER with great new features and slicker look, please follow the updates at getcu3er.com.

You can also take a look at first screencast we’ve made for CU3ER v1

Thanks!

Code Snippets : Solving Flash loading problem with WMode and Firefox

I’ve recently experienced problems on few AS3 websites. If you embed your SWF file with different WMode, like opaque or transparent in Firefox your Flash won’t load. Actually the Flash loads first frame and then it seems like it stops. Well, it certainly loads but the problem is that loaderInfo Event.COMPLETE and PROGRESS are not fired in Firefox.

That is LAME! Firefox has this “advanced” feature with Flash, it doesn’t load it until that browser tab has focus. Seems like we’re getting problem from there. Anyway, a workaround is to set the Event.ENTER_FRAME function that will check loader

addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, _listenLoading);// on enter frame to check if it’s loaded
private function _listenLoading(e:Event):void {
  if (this.loaderInfo.bytesLoaded == this.loaderInfo.bytesTotal) {
    removeEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, _listenLoading);
    _onSiteLoaded();
  }
}

					

The Upper Storey – Senior Flash Developer wanted!

Company I am currently working at is on a lookout for serious Flash coder. We are having a nice stream of interesting projects and I am sure you would like the environment. Please read the job description and apply if you’re interested. Hope we find somebody interesting and eager to move forward with us.

Company: The Upper Storey

Location: Singapore

Position: Senior Flash Developer

Information:

The Upper Storey is not your typical interactive agency, nor your typical creative department. We are known for our innovative concepts, our endless supply of creativity, our tight-knit work family. We take great pride in our team and we live and breathe our work.

Job Summary:

You will develop interactive elements, including web pages, flash objects, or any rich media content for various touchpoints. Additionally, you will provide leadership in the use of Flash technology and mentor junior developers on the team.. Projects range from Rich Media and Game Programming to flash websites and banners with dynamic content. You work closely with creative team to deliver cutting edge rich media solutions for our clients.

Responsibilities:

• Ability to mentor junior team members
• Apply your visual design skills to create dynamic and complex Flash Designs.
• Involvement in the conceptual phase of projects. Work closely with creative lead, IA, Content Strategist and front-end developer to deliver-media rich client solutions.
• Understanding of Video codec’s and advanced video encoding options in Flash.
• Understanding of 3rd party implementations and extensions
• Active Flash, Flex, Developer Community involvement.
• Constant R&D on new technologies that will help The Upper Storey push the boundaries

Job Requirements:

• 5+ years of industry experience in ActionScript 2.0 or 3.0 for Flash applications integrated with server-side web applications and CMS
• ServerSide Scripting such as PHP, JavaScript and Flex
• Experience implementing OOP concepts with ActionScript
• XHTML / CSS (validating), DHTML (JQuery), AJAX
• Building integrated data-driven applications and sites that link to other third part apis such as facebook and open social
• Optimization of creative elements for varying bandwidth and platform requirements
• Strong written and oral communication skills

To Apply:

Please send email to coder@upperstorey.com

AS3 Optimisations tips and speed tests

New great article is out talking about optimisation tips in AS3 – http://www.insideria.com/2009/04/51-actionscript-30-and-flex-op.html

also very nice suggestions and speed test can be found here – http://osflash.org/as3_speed_optimizations

Roxik at Adobe MAX 2008 [Video]

http://jp.max.adobe.com/player.html?2-10

What better could we ask for ? This is Roxik presentation from Adobe MAX, great talk even if there is no translation. But like my friend said, awesomness doesn’t need translation 🙂

Actionscript Snippets : Get Flashvars in AS3

I am starting here a new series of posts, an Actionscript snippets that are useful in everyday programming. This is mainly because I don’t have time to share full source codes and examples, but I will try to find it. Until then I will post codes that are small but useful.

Let’s start with getting a Flashvars in AS3, something we often need to do

private function getFlashVars():Object {
	return Object( LoaderInfo( this.loaderInfo ).parameters );
}

remove private from function if you code in Flash IDE, but I hope you are into OOP thing.
After this retrieving of Flashvar is easy

_var1 = getFlashVars().var1;  // var1 is the name of the passed Flash variable

watch out, if var1 is not passed value returned will be undefined, so you can use like Ian Kirk said, but watch out for passing 0 value as Flash var then…

_var1 = getFlashVars().var1 || "defaulValue";  // var1 is the name of the passed Flash variable

Flash Supersites : IKEA | PS

I am so glad to add one site to the Flash Supersites links – again there  is a great experience of discovering IKEAs ideas nad products.

IKEA | PS is new product line from IKEA, and every product has it’s story, which is nicely presented through Flash website, rich with video and animaton experience.

IKEA | PS

SWF to Video SDK – a command line SWF to video conversion

Soon I will need to make a server side conversion of a SWF XML fed animation to video, and seems like I found a solution. It’s Moyea SWF to Video SDK, which works really nice. If you know any other options please let me know…

http://www.swfkits.com/swf-to-video-sdk/

Key Features of SWF to Video SDK

• Convert local and online SWF to video files in any formats for developers’ development goals
• Convert SWF files which called through Parameter to video in any formats for developers’ development goals
• Support video resizing and trimming to meet specific needs
• Support AVI with Alpha Channel conversion to retain the original transparency
• Process 32 bits RGBA file for further edit in Adobe Premiere
• Adopt Lower-Playback-Speed technology to achieve accurate audio and video synchronization and no frame loss
• Adopt audio-extracting technology, instead of recording; to 100% keep the original sound effect
• Support multiple SWF files automatic conversion
• FREE TRIAL WITH NO TIME LIMIT. NO SPYWARE, NO ADWARE, NO VIRUSES. 100% CLEAN.

Flash SEO video by Technoracle – How search indexing Flash Player works…

This is exactly how we imagined it works, as it was the only normal way… I am a bit worried about Flash apps without states, how the crawled goes through that stuff.
Anyway let’s see how much we’re going to wait for this to be implemented by Google and rest…