part designer. part developer. all creative
Well, sort of. I just added an OpenSearch plugin to the site, that adds a ‘spikything’ search option to the search drop-down in FireFox 2+ and IE7+. To add the search plugin on your browser, click the drop down arrow on the search bar in your browser (top-right) and click ‘Add spikything search’.
Here’s more info on how to do this yourself.
I just stumbled across this rather useful OpenType font editor. Called typelight, there are freeware and business licensing options available and you should certainly consider it before forking out for something like Fontographer.
Here's a quick snippet of code for integrating your SWFs with JavaScript, using ExternalInterface:
// Calling a JavaScript function from AS3 (with optional parameters)
if (ExternalInterface.available) ExternalInterface.call("javascriptFunction", param1, param2);
// Implementing a JavaScript callback in AS3 (flashFunction is called when JavaScript calls javascriptFunction)
if (ExternalInterface.available) ExternalInterface.addCallback("javascriptFunction", flashFunction);
I just got back from a couple of weeks exploring Turkey. Living on kebabs and melting in up to 40 degree heat was the challenging kind of fun and I managed to see pretty much all of western Turkey in an exhausting 4000km road trip. I also got to ride a hot air balloon through the valleys of Cappadoccia, which was pretty damn cool!
I cobbled this webcam demo together for no other reason than creative curiosity - a half of mirrors for the information age, I guess - source
I started trying to find useful things to do with face detection, but with limited success. I tried using the Libspark Haar Cascades implementation of face detection with Papervision3D to create a sort of head tracking effect, but it's a little flaky - partly because of poor tracking accuracy and partly because it's too CPU intensive. You can view it on its own page here.
I've been asked a few times now to create effects that require multiple instances of the Flash Player on a page to interact and remain in sync - even with interaction. Because of this, using timed events is no good and because of harddrive thrashing (which I won't do for what might just be some banners) you can't use Flash cookie updates. Also, when you have more than 2 SWFs, deciding which SWF updates who becomes tricky. I came up with this solution, using LocalConnection with a twist, which works pretty well - but if anyone has a better method, drop it in a comment 
I just found this online multiplayer Flash game for Terminator Salvation. Multiuser Flash games have come a long way since I built Dinky Bomb all those years ago. The graphics are very impressive and overall I'm really impressed, though the gameplay is perhaps a little awkward. Essentially though, the best genre of multuser game for Flash seems still to be strategy over all-out action. Maybe the introduction of UDP and binary sockets to Flash 10 will change that.
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