Sound Visualizer—Static Ball

OK, this is the final post about sound visualizations in Flash ... at least for a while. I've been working on this globe/static ball thing for at least the past week. I think it turned out pretty well. It's my final entry for the contest at Lee Brimelow's tutorial site, gotoAndLearn.
I really liked this idea because it added the idea of user interaction with a sound visualizer, plus I got to explore some cool effects and just have fun making something that looks nice.

After the contest is over (12:00 AM tomorrow morning), I'm planning on posting the source for all of these sound experiments so they can be of more benefit to all you sound flash people out there.

Adobe Apollo FAQ

If you've heard or or used Flex, chances are you have heard of Apollo. It's a runtime that will run cross-platform and enable web developers to make somewhat seamless web-to-desktop applications. In reading Mike Chamber's blog, I ran across the link to an Apollo FAQ that will answer a lot of questions that you may have about Apollo.

Keith Peters—Actionscript Animation

I just got this great book in the mail yesterday. For anyone who likes experimental Flash, or who would like to learn about how they can make the cool stuff they see on everyone else's websites, this book is practically a must-have. It covers everything from basic trig to some advanced 3d techniques. I am loving it.

Keith Peters, author and creator of BIT-101, does a great job of simplifying mathematical concepts that usually scare the crap out of most of us. He also does really well in explaining the relationship of real-world trigonometry to Flash's coordinate system and why. He gives good code examples and coaches you through animation concepts to help you feel comfortable with some pretty cool effects. It's the best-selling Actionscript book for 2006, and eveyone I've read seems to really like it too.

Buy it here.

MouseEvent Class

Here's a simple example of how to use the events in the MouseEvent class in Actionscript 3.0.
I had to use a workaround for the DOUBLE_CLICK event because of nested movieclips that throw off some of the mouse events.

Source

Sound Visualizer—Fire Ring

I did this visualizer on Friday after going through Lee Brimelow's tutorial on 3d Carousels. It seemed like a good application and was fun to make.

Try clicking and dragging on the graphic to make the rotation speed change.

It's Official

There really is a "method" to all the madness.

Cowboy Coding

Sound Visualizer—Sparkler

Another fun afternoon with the sound capabilities of Actionscript 3.0

SimpleButton Class in Actionscript 3.0

I was playing with the SimpleButton class in AS 3.0 and decided it would be nice to post a simple example with some tips.

The SimpleButton class allows you to create—you guessed it—simple buttons. It's basically a dynamic way to create Buttons with predefined states used in Flash.

Here's the visual (not much to look at):

And the code:

package {

import flash.display.Sprite;
import flash.display.SimpleButton;

public class Source extends Sprite {

public var button:SimpleButton;
private var numButtonWidth:Number = 100;
private var numButtonHeight:Number = 50;

public function Source() {

button = new SimpleButton;
button.upState = drawButtonState(0xDAD8F3);
button.overState = drawButtonState(0x4F42C6);
button.downState = drawButtonState(0xDDF2FF);
button.hitTestState = drawButtonState(0xDDF2FF);
button.useHandCursor = true;
this.addChild(button);

}

private function drawButtonState(rgb:uint):Sprite {
var sprite:Sprite = new Sprite();
sprite.graphics.lineStyle(4,0x33621E,1);
sprite.graphics.beginFill(rgb);
sprite.graphics.drawRoundRect(((this.stage.
stageWidth/2)-(numButtonWidth/2)),((this.
stage.stageHeight/2)-(numButtonHeight/2)),
numButtonWidth,numButtonHeight,10,10);
return sprite;
}

}

}

ActionScript 3 Tips and Tricks

Found a good list of ActionScript 3 Tips and Tricks over at kirupa.com forums. One of the tips, posted by the guys over at senocular.com, shows how to use the new event on the stage, MOUSE_LEAVE. It triggers when the mouse leaves your flash application. This new event in ActionScript 3 solves alot of problems flash has had in the past about being able to detect when the SWF has lost focus on a web page. Here is a list of all the tips.

Sound Visualizer—Variation

I'm loving this sound stuff. Even though obviously Actionscript 3.0 isn't all sound stuff, I'm just having way too much fun with this.

Sound Visualizer—Variation

Just a little variation on the sound visualizer from before. The blocks combine and the background fades to black instead of the bluish hue.