Archive for January, 2009

Gavin Strange – Apple store talk

Thursday, January 29th, 2009 | Apple, Design | 2 Comments

Gavin Strange at Apple Store Bristol

Gavin Strange at Apple Store Bristol

Managed to catch Gavin Strange Aka JamFactory giving a talk last night at my local Apple Store in Bristol, He’s a talented guy who’s done a bit of everything in design, web, iilustration, art, and even his own line of toys. I was especially impressed with the attention to detail he’d shown in the pieces he passed round. The skateboard cuckoo clock, and box work for his Droplet toys were especially good. Unfortunatley i had to shoot off just after it finished so i didn’t get a chance to say hello, but be sure to check out his work at http://www.jam-factory.com

Top tip if you plan on attending an Apple Store talk: Ditch the coat early doors as it gets proper warm with that many people crammed in.

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AS3 TextField buttonMode or useHandCursor?

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 | Actionscript 3, Quick Tip | 27 Comments

Unfortunatly, no method exits on the TextField class in AS3 as it does not extend the Sprite class, which contains the buttonMode property.

This is most apparent with the annoying problem of having a TextField inside your Sprite/MovieClip you;re trying to use as a button, where even after setting buttonMode = true on the button, rolling over the textfield inside the button will revert the Cursor back to default.

To get round this simply use the mouseChildren = false property on your Sprite/Movieclip button.

i.e.

myTextFieldContainingSprite.buttonMode = true;

myTextFieldContainingSprite.mouseChildren = false;

myTextFieldContainingSprite.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN …… etc

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What do i do for a dayjob? Projects like this…

Thursday, January 15th, 2009 | Dayjob | No Comments

I’ve had a few emails asking what sort of things i do for a day job. Well here’s an example, i’m currently head of flash over at Coull.com, a great bunch of people. With all the advertising this year having to be more engaging to provide the clients with a good reason to spend their ad budgets, Interactive advertising like this is going to be huge. It seems pointless to do a flat ad in this day and age when you get so much more by engaging with the viewers.

With our technology we allow users to interactive with objects in the video, clicking through to find out more information or straight to buy the product.


Get Adobe Flash player

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Using Amazon Products API and Flash

Monday, January 12th, 2009 | Actionscript 3, Affiliate Marketing | No Comments

Update: – Due to the Amazon API changes requiring Signature and Timestamps which breaks this post, i have created a new post which updates this process here….

EDIT:There was a bug with the demo when showing a product with no customer review as i’m using that as the flavour text in this demo. Fixed in demo and source code.

Continuing the theme of Affiliate marketing, here’s a free source code demo of how to use Amazon products in flash. It uses similar process’s I’ve demoed before, signing up for the API, creating a php page to receive the keywords then search the Amazon API, and then return the data in XML format to the Flash front end.

To get started yourself, register for Amazon associates account – http://aws.amazon.com/associates/, then download the example code, change my code for yours so you receive the percentage, and play away.

Here I’ve just parsed the response xml for the products into instances of my AmazonProductData.as Class. This makes it easy to code against, and be confident in the ability to retrieve basic data about each product without spelling or case mistakes. As long as you’re using FlashDevelop, FDT or FlexBuilder that is.

I will make a full scale tutorial on how to use the API, parse the data and create a simple front end like this when i get a chance and finish creating LearnToFlash.com .

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