PQ DVD is running a promotion for all bloggers for their new AS3.0 application called PQ Talking Photo. PQ Talking Photo allows you to animate a photo together with full Lip-synching! And for a limited time, blog about PQ Talking Photo to receive this software ABSOLUTELY FREE!
Then you can put talking animals in your blog, your mySpace, like you see below.
Give it a whirl!
Came across a post by Wayne Marsh today, documenting the tools he uses to develop in Actionscript 3.0 without his wallet being set back by a dollar. And it is exactly the same as how I do it as well, with the long awaited release of FlashDevelop 3 looming.
So be sure to go over for a look at how you can start developing in Actionscript 3.0 for less than a penny.
I will be attending Mix On Campus 2007 at Melbourne! There are a few sessions I’m extremely interested in (XNA, web development), although I’m not exactly sold on Popfly. Still very much a supporter of Flash over Silverlight, so I guess this is their chance to sell it to me!
Very excited (first convention I’m attending) so anyway, be sure to RSVP at their site if you are interested as well else you’ll miss out!
And with that, I now have more time to spend playing around with Flash and AS3. For the past few days I’ve been working on Aria, as well as a game that I will submit to Kongregate (working with Tetrominos are a pain, by the way), so I will be posting more often for the next few months.
Glidias has created a very awesome looking fireworks creator. Its only a test, but still equally impressive. Click here!
Note: don’t ask me how old my country is. I am pretty sure it is 42, but don’t expect me to actually get this sort of things right. 
Seems that my contact form has finally been spidered by spammers. Therefore, I will be taking it down, since it is flooding my mailbox.
Some people really need a life… No I don’t need a new ToyAta or a Lexus give me a break!
I’ve been playing abit with Papervision3D recently, and I’m seriously impressed with their work. However, there were some parts I had trouble with, but I’m willing to let it pass, as it is still in Beta status. Seemingly trivial things like “changing the textures of each side of a cube” seems to require some subclass. And in some cases, I still found evidence of bad clipping. Though that is probably my fault.
Over the next few days, look out for my wonderous journey in learning Papervision3D.
Recent speculation suggests that the Adobe Flash Player plugin would be coming sooner for Apple iPhone’s Safari sooner than we’d thought/dreamed.
I can’t even begin to speculate the amount of possibility this opens up to flash developers. This is perhaps far more revolutionary than WiiFlash! Imagine the touchscreen capability of the Nintendo DS, opening up to the Flash platform, allowing for a whole new slew of creative works for Flash. One thing I’d definitely want to see, if the above does turn out to be true, is a port of Ouendan!.
That aside, though, there will be a number of things to think about. Firstly, public adoption of the iPhone seems rather low at the moment to me, due to price and also network restriction. Not to mention its only only available in the US. The other interesting thing I’d like to see being taken advantaged of would be the iPhone’s Multi-Touch technology. Most “WiiFlash” games that take advantage of the WiiMote are no more than glorified Flash games using the mouse. How would Flash developers be able to take advantage of the different Multi-Touch capabilities?
Although this may never come, its still something worth keeping a tab on.
I was recently alerted to a new marketing effort by XGen Studios, asking people to guess the name of their new game.
And I believe I may have guessed the name.
The clue gives a direct letter swapping. Thus it would be most possible that the first and last words are similar. Also, the most logical word for the middle is “the”, meaning that “e” represents “s”.
Thus, the best combination I could get is “Pillage the Village”! So if this is right, I got it right here first!
Recently I’ve begun my foray into the web developing world, where I was asked to develop a site for a small start up company. After a year of operation, my client decided it was time to revamp the website in order to impress her bigger clients. “Flashy” was the buzz word thrown about during our initial discussion regarding the redesign.
By that time I had already decided to investigate AJAX technologies, and apply them to this project. (Some of you who know me might know how much I shun Full Flash websites, and was reluctant to use it despite the term “flashy” used a few times). And in a short time I was using the MooTools JS library to perform most of the grunt work.
Having the MooTools library granted me a considerable speed boost in developing, and I had an impressive and “flashy” gallery frontend coded in 2 nights (that surprised even me, a newbie in this arena). By that time I was hooked. Images were loaded dynamically, with images resizing and fading into view. Then the terrible blow came when I passed it on my friends to try it.
Lo and behold, it died. Turns out my site doesn’t render very well in some other browsers. Not only that, it was completely inert without Javascript!
Thus I embarked on a google-quest for the holy-grail, and came across numerous articles on both sides of the epic battle. It was then that numerous “flaws” of AJAX was revealed to me. But the main problem, however, was me! I was abusing AJAX, and that worked against me. Which brings me to the first point: just because something can be done easily doesn’t mean you should do it.
The speed at which I was developing AJAX lured me into thinking that I could use it for the entire site. This meant that it suffered from many userability issues that was prevalent with Flash websites. I was falling into bad habits again without noticing it!
And what are the problems?
Of course, one could easily build 2 version of the site. But while that allows Javascript to gracefully degrade, it doesn’t take away the problems associated with abusive AJAX in the first place.
So my conclusion is that one should always take care not to abuse AJAX. Building entire sites for public view is not a good idea. However, so called RIAs or Web Applications use AJAX as a given. The key here is being able to distinguish between an Application and a Site. If all you’re making is a site, you’re better off not using AJAX for anything at all.
The best way to look at it is to imagine yourself using your site. Turn off Javascript. Then try navigating your site. If you have difficulty, its time to rethink your strategy.