Have you ever wanted to write an application for a mobile phone? If your phone has an inbuilt Flash Lite player, then you can use many of the SWiSH Max family (e.g. Max3, Max2, miniMax3 and miniMax2) to create applications. These applications could include phone extensions, games, converters and other utility applications (eg bus, train timetables). This article will get you started.
Flash Lite is a cut down Flash player that is supplied on many mid-range to high-end mobile phones. Sony Ericsson have at least 18 models and Nokia have about 90 models that support different versions of Flash Lite. Consult your phone specifications to see if it has a Flash Lite player. Read the rest of this entry »
The Google Desktop allows you to run Google Gadgets on your XP, Vista or Windows 7 desktop. Versions are also available for Linux and Mac. This means that a Google Gadget could have a far wider audience than a Vista / Win7 Gadget. This article explains how to make one using your Flash files.
Converting your .swf file to a gadget is surprisingly easy. You will nead a couple of things though:
1. A site to host your .swf file. (SWiSH Space can do this).
2. The Developer SDK. This is a free download from Google.
Step 1: Download and Install the SDK.
Download the SDK from the link shown above. At time of writing the SDK is distributed in a .zip file. Once the download is complete, extract the contents of the .zip file to a convenient location.
The application you need to run is: api/tools/designer_en.exe (depending on the settings of your computer, the .exe extension may not be displayed) Read the rest of this entry »
A 3D looking cylinder can be drawn reasonably easily using two ellipses joined with a rectangle. Shading is then applied to give a 3D look. Although easy, it becomes tedious if a number of cylinders need to be drawn. To make the task easier, we have created a new SWiSH Max3 / miniMax3 cylinder component.
The component allows the size of the cylinder to be specified, as well as the 3 colors. This greatly speeds up the drawing process if multiple cylinders of different shapes and colors need to be drawn. The height measurement is the height of the rectangular middle section. The overall height of the cylinder will be greater. Read the rest of this entry »
Many people may be unaware that the scripting used by SWiSH Max3 is mostly compatible with Flash AS2 (Action Script 2). This means that even though the Max3 help file does not describe some of the more advanced objects available to AS2, you can still probably use them with Max3. The Max3 help file does detail areas where known differences occur. One interesting object that is not listed in the Max3 documentation is the Shared Object. It allows a Flash movie to save configuration data (depending on configuration settings) to the local computer. This behavior is analogous to cookies in http.
The Shared Object is available with Flash Player 6 and later. Documentation for the Shared Object can be found on the adobe site. The Adobe AS2 script reference can be viewed (and downloaded) in pdf format here.
Shared Objects are like cookies. They are snippets of data created in the SWF which are stored locally on the user’s computer.Other SWF movies (or the original movie, on the same domain) can then retrieve the stored data. This type of data storage is useful to store things like user high scores in games, user configuration options for a website or shopping cart data. Read the rest of this entry »
Over the past few months we’ve released and revised a lot of new components. Most of the releases are discussed elsewhere on this blog. We have also corrected some minor reported problems with other components.
A while back we demonstrated how to make a magnifying glass using simple masking. Although this masking technique works very well, it cannot be used to simulate fish-eye type lenses or other lenses that result in distortion of the image. Using the Flash 8 displacement filter, we have created a new component that simplifies the creation of lenses that show distortion.
The lens outline can be made invisible which allows the user to distort areas of an image in a seamless manner. The image below is an example of such distortions. The left most image is the unaltered image, the middle image shows its head expanded using a magnify lens and the right most image shows its head reduced using a reducing lens.
