My lovely & uber talented wife recently launched her new portfolio with the help of yours truly. When it comes to portfolios I believe the minimalist approach is the way to go, but for her as a designer we needed to be a lil more robust. By utilising the latest features available in Flash Player 10, I think we created an engaging site without all the overhead. So have a look at some award winning sites & concepts.
Mariana’s husband,
(-o|o-)
It appears that in newer browsers the KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN is being perpetually dispatched when a key is being held down. Older browsers behavior would only execute once, when it was initially pressed. When I ran into this issue I couldn’t find any information about it, but is partly why Keith is eating crow ;) However in my simple implementation it was easy enough to removeEventListener on KEY_DOWN and addEventListener on KEY_UP. Now I am not sure who to blame here on this one, new browser standards or Adobe? I will avoid the blame Adobe first attitude here, as the player versions were the same just in different browser generations.
Holding down,
(-o|o-)
Well I finally updated my portfolio. I started this back in April and at the time decided to use APE for the physics. I was having some issues with tunneling, got busy at work for some months and when I came back to it I decided to port it over to Box2D. While I find Box2D to be a more robust physics solution, I also find it more difficult to use than APE. The difference in code is at least twice as much. Its for this reason I believe Zevan over at ActionSnippet created QuickBox2D. Now I didn’t use that in my portfolio, but I would consider it for future projects utilizing Box2D.
public static const STEPHEN:Stadler;
(-o|o-)
Dear Adobe,
WTF does this DisplayObject property actually do? And why does it only seem to work when done with code and not the check mark in the IDE? Here’s what I think it should be doing it should be taking a snapshot of that DisplayObject and all its nested children and displaying it as a bitmap, much like Director’s image property. Now when should that snapshot change? I’d assume it’d change only when anything in it actually changed. However I don’t find this to be the case. A perfect example is a TextField nested in a MovieClip. I set cacheAsBitmap to true, both in the IDE & code to both the TextField & MovieClip, animate it and get all those known issues of animating TextFields on subpixels. This shouldn’t be the case if it were a bitmap and if you zoom in (rt-click) on the object you can see the text is still vector and not raster. So as per usual the workaround here is to create a bitmapData and take your own snapshot of the DisplayObject, but isn’t this exactly what cacheAsBitmap is supposed to do? The only success I ever had with this property is for creating alpha masks, but again this MUST be done in code cause it doesn’t work if you do it in the IDE. Flash is akin to What You See Might Not Be What You Get or better yet don’t believe your eyes, or mind, when it comes to Flash.
Flashing you,
(-o|o-)
At the beginning of the year I jumped on board and started using the FLARToolkit. Coincidentally shortly after that Lee over at The Flash Blog posted a tutorial on the subject. Since that time AR has spread like wildfires thru Southern California. Come September a friend was pitching an idea around AR and needed a proof of concept. Having done some work previously in the field I was happy to oblige. This is the product of a couple nites work. (You will need the marker from the GE Smart Grid which can be found on the link below.)
Now it should be noted that the GE Smart Grid was originally done with the cover of Popular Science in Director using a custom Xtra that does not require the use of markers. It was then ported to the Flash based version we are all more familiar with. The Director/Shockwave’s 3D, responsiveness and level of interactivity (you can blow into your microphone to spin the wind turbines) is far superior to Flash’s.
Constantly directing,
(-o|o-)
After some time now I finally got around to updating the homepage again. Anyone who has followed d-Visions.com, and I’m sure that’s no one, knows that d-Visions is a fraction of my current self.
The current homepage is based on perspective experiments I posted at http://wonderfl.net/user/sh0ckwav Starting with this example found in the help file, yes the same help file I am now a contributor to (see previous post), I slowly made it into something for my own needs. Feel free to fork it!
Constantly dividing,
(-o|o-)
Looks like someone over at Adobe feels I contributed to the community in a helpful manner 
Making a difference! Here’s the reprinted email I got from them yesterday:
“Hi, sh0ckwav
Thank you for posting a comment to http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/flash/geom/Utils3D.html on 06/12/2009. Your comment has been approved. In fact, it was so helpful, you have been given 5 Adobe Community Help points. These community points are now displayed on your profile page. For more information, please see the Adobe Community Help FAQ at http://community.adobe.com/help/profile/faq.html.
We appreciate your participation in the Adobe community.
Thank you
Adobe Community Help Team”
Plan or invent by careful thought.