I'm back

It has been a very long time since I have posted anything, and long overdue.

mac flash wheel

Why flash will not support mac's mouse wheel is still not clear, but there are fixes out there. We chose to go with spark's solution because of its adoption into the gaia framework. Unfortunately there is not much documentation to be found, and the instructions are only three simple steps, which is one too few. Here's what was missing:

activating the javascript from the html...
This is the one line of code that should be placed in the html and is not mentioned:
/*< script type="text/javascript" src="js/swfwheel.js">< /script >*/
(minus the extra spaces I inserted so the code would show in my blog...)

All that I needed was this added to the html, and voila.

From now on, even if it is not in the documentation... I will check to see if the javascript is being activated by the html.

new sneakers

Well, this week I just bought a new pair of sneakers. They are LAKAI shoes promoting the new release of Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are". I can't wait to see it. It has been a great inspiration for me, and I'm sure for hundreds of other people as well.

On another sneaker note:
I have been working on creating a "sneaking" walk cycle for our "dweller" character here at the basement. I'm out of practice but it's not bad for the first walk cycle in years. A little tweaking and I think I could say I'm proud of it.

I have a Green Sock!!!

I have been using GreenSock's TweenLite for a couple days now. I am amazed at the power in such a light-weight tween engine. 3k!!!

I am beginning to explore TweenMax and I am finding that this may just be my new favorite engine! It is fairly lightweight, but even more amazingly powerful.(even more better!) I have also gone ahead and downloaded GreenSock's additional classes (XML and preloader)

I am anxious to see what new tricks I can accomplish with these new tools!

Interactive Television

I had my first experience with interactive television last night during the Olympics. I was watching the Oxygen Network Olympic coverage. I subscribe to Directv.

A message on the screen said to press the red button on my controller.

A very sleek and well-designed menu box appeared in the left-bottom corner of the screen. It was not your old "two-tone, square, windows95-looking menu." It had nice color, gradients, and bevels. I was impressed.

Best, was what it actually did. I could answer trivia questions about the Olympics, or view stats. I was able to view a list of all countries and total medals won, and a break-down of gold/silver/bronze for each country. This was great information, and at my fingertips. There was more on the menu but I didn't get to it in time.

I exited the menu during the commercial break. Unfortunately during the break, the menu was unavailable. And due to my attention span, before the break was over I had changed channels and moved on to other things, on my laptop.

I look forward to using this during the remainder of the 2008 Summer Olympics.

As2 Dynamics

I just want to remember this for the future:
attachMovie("dot", "dot1", getNextHighestDepth(),{x:1, y4:, xscale:50, yscale:50});

I am currently looking for a way to set the color or tint within this array. If you know... please leave a comment.

I've tried Tint_tint, getRGB, & Color, with no luck, at all.

Its just another weapon in my arse(arsenal)...lol

centering horizontal and vertical using css

Here's another boring post so I don't forget this technique!
(I have left off "<" of tags so browsers do not read as html....


I have found this to work centering vertical and horizontal using css:

style title="Default" media="screen" type="text/css">
#center { position: absolute; top: 50%; width: 100%; height: 586px; overflow: visible }
#main { position: absolute; left: 50%; width: 854px; margin-left: -427px; height: 5586px; top:-270px }
/style>

(I did adjust the absolute values according to my swf's dimensions)
_____________________________________________________________________________
I put my tiling body background image in the body tags:

style type="text/css">
body {
background-image: url('images/myImage.jpg');
background-repeat: repeat-x
background-repeat: repeat-y
}
/style>
_____________________________________________________________________________ Then I placed the div identifier tags below that...

div id="center">
div id="main">

(mySWFgoes in these tags)
don't forget to close the /div>s!