iGeeks

November 17th, 2003

Copyright and License

We all should respect copyright and license of contents on the web. The first thing to see is, if they have a license like from Creative Commons. If a web author have specified the way their content can be used, then it is an easy way to copy, modify and repost it somewhere, else things will not be so nice. If you are web author, then create a license of your own and post it on your website so that people can know what to do with your content without consulting you. Otherwise, it is a good practice to consult the original write-up before doing a rip-off. A good example can be seen at Brajeshwar’s website with his Attribution-NonCommercial 1.0 license.

Brajeshwar | No comments

November 16th, 2003

Animate an Object with ActionScript

This just a basic flash action tutorial. I want to show you how to animate an object with actionscript.

Load Flash. Set the frame rate to 21. Draw a small circle on the stage and convert it to a movieclip, Give your movieclip this action.

onClipEvent (load) {
//this sets the initial x position of our clip
this._x = 50;
}
onClipEvent (enterFrame) {
//this moves our clip 5 pixels to the right every frame
this._x = this._x+5;
}

Test your movie.
Continued

Hemant | 8 comments

November 15th, 2003

Make Your Web Pages Speak

Folks I was just surfing some sites long back when I read this article. I don’t have the link of the site but if I get it I will post it. But its a good one.
The aural rendering of a document, already commonly used by the blind and print-impaired communities, combines speech synthesis and “auditory icons.” Often such aural presentation occurs by converting the document to plain text and feeding this to a screen reader — software or hardware that simply reads all the characters on the screen. This results in less effective presentation than would be the case if the document structure were retained. Style sheet properties for aural presentation may be used together with visual properties (mixed media) or as an aural alternative to visual presentation.
Continued

Hemant | 2 comments

November 15th, 2003

Are Web Graphics Square??

Web pages are almost always designed with Web graphics. But if you don’t understand some basic principles about Web graphics, you won’t be able to create great Web pages.
Web Graphics are Square
The first, and most basic principle to understand about Web graphics is that they are square, or rectangular.
The best way to see this is by looking at a Web graphic in a graphics software program. Pick a graphic that doesn’t look square, for example, the “Go” icon at the top of this page (next to the search box). It looks round, doesn’t it? But it’s not, it’s square. Try downloading it (right click, “Save Picture As…”) and opening it in Photoshop, Freehand, or Paint Shop Pro. The picture in the image is round(ish), but the actual image is square.
All Web graphics are square because of the nature of the Web. The Web is displayed on computers. Computers display pictures as millions of tiny dots. But even those dots are not round, they too are square.
Pixels in Web Graphics
As I mentioned above, all Web graphics are made up up millions of tiny dots, called pixels. Each pixel is a tiny tiny square that is colored to form the basis of the image. There is a similar technique in painting, called pointillism developed by Georges Seurat. The thing about computer pointillism is that pixels are square. This forces the shape of the final image to be square.
But if the basic unit of a Web graphic is square, then how are we able to create images that have round or curved elements, and appear to have round edges? This is accomplished with two techniques: anti-aliasing and transparency.

Hemant | 2 comments

November 14th, 2003

Fonts for Programmers

Grab some good monospaced fonts for coding from here.

Abdul Qabiz | 1 comment

November 11th, 2003

Flash Updater Released !!

Macromedia has released a patch (7.0.1) for Flash MX 2004 and Flash MX 2004 Professional. This includes new documentation, and greatly improved stability, speed and much more.

If you have evaluated Flash and never purchased, your evaluation period has been extended by 30 days to re-evaluate Flash and check out whether it works well enough for you.

Download the patch:
http://www.macromedia.com/support/flash/downloads.html

Release Notes: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flash/mx2004/releasenotes.html#Update

Extending the trial period:
http://www.macromedia.com/support/service/ts/documents/flashmx_trial.htm

Rajender | No comments

November 7th, 2003

Sound in Flash - Good Tutorials

Sounds in Flash is one of the less understood concepts among most of us. Infact official documentation does not have better explanation even on different sync settings for sound.

I am sure, most of us have had problems with it once atleast. I had similar problem once, I searched for a while and found some good tutorials at sonify.org

I really like this one, which cleared my fundamentals on sync settings.

There are other places where one can find information on sound integration in Flash. Sites like were-here, flashkit etc have dedicated forums for sound.

Some direct links:
1) Sonify Tutorials
2) Sound sync settings
3) Were-Here Sound Forum
4) Flashkit Sound forum

Abdul Qabiz | 1 comment

November 5th, 2003

MySQL Best Practices

O’Reilly’s onlamp.com has a good article on Ten MySQL Best Practices by George Reese.

Rajender | No comments

November 2nd, 2003

FlashCommand

Mike Chambers has just finished his Command Line Compiler for Flash MX 2004 Pro. Makes it possible to compile a fla file by the command line. Unfortunately, that does not function on Mac and requires to have framework .NET installed.

See in the comments, one explains us how to compile starting from SciTE.

Don’t forget the see the IMPORTANT information also.

Rajender | No comments

November 2nd, 2003

C# & Flash Communication

I was trying for C# and Flash communication, got a nice tutorial on C# & Flash communication.

Rajender | 1 comment