Flashalisious

Nashville, TN and the surrounding area has it’s first official Flex user group. We will be focusing on Development of rich internet applications and also desktop applications using the newest platforms from Adobe. This will consist of Flex, AIR (Apollo) and the current version of Actionscript. If you are interested in joining you just need to have an interest in Flash and ActionScript and live in the 615 area code. http://615flex.com to sign up.

Thanks to all the guys that joined the group so far. We are planning our first group meeting for June 30 2007. If you can make it please check out http://615flex.com/polls/meeting.php

Let’s move forward and make this group of developers something great. Our main focus will be helping each members grow in their skills and build some really cool stuff.

ApolloHunter.com is a simple site to download, upload and share Adobe Apollo apps! This is a great site to see who is doing what in Apollo development. Maybe by the end of the summer you will be able to see something I have done on this site?

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Three new cheatsheets for developers using and getting started with Apollo. All of the new Apollo Classes are on the sheets (and a few updates to existing AS3 Classes). There are definitely some cool new Classes including but not limited to: Apollo Application, HTML, HTMLControl, File, FileStream, Shell, JavaScriptObject, Shell and more.

Although I have been developing in Flash and ActionScript 2.0 for a wile now, I am totally new to Flex, Apollo, and ActionScript 3. These cheatsheets will come in handy for everyone, not just the newbie. Hope to see a paper back in this to keep on my desk sometime soon.

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Welcome to the Wacky World of Jazz and Thelonious Moog. This group came to me about a month ago and supplied me with great illustration work by Wayno. The group wanted an updated site that they could incorporate mp3 samples and also some video. If you like cool wacky synth jazz you should check this one out.

This web site was the first on that I got to use the new Adobe CS3 Web Design Premium that I purchased. The integration between photoshop and Flash was great. I was able to design every page using Wayno’s illustration work in photoshop and then dump that right into flash for building the animations for the web site.

Wanted to let everyone know that I have a twitter page now. Just wanted to try it out and see how it goes. I have heard of twitter for a wile and thought that it sounds like pretty cool idea so….. we will see how it goes. Here is a the link to my page http://twitter.com/mswallace

SWFAddress 1.1is it’s name and deep linking is it’s game. This looks like a great feature to add to any flash based web site. I will help direct the users to a location of your web site that may not be right on the homepage. I think that it is really important that as Flash developers that we do our best to make our content accessible and easy to get to. Below is a link to the article that I found on this. Check it out.

SWFAddress - Deep Linking for Flash
— SWFAddress is a new open source project that provides deep linking and search engine indexing for Flash Websites and applications. In other words, it enables the Back, Forward, and Reload buttons of the browser and creates unique URLs that can be sent over e-mail or IM. Recently it reached version 1.0 and quickly gained the attention of top design agencies and interactive developers. SWFAddress started as a small experiment that aimed to enhance a typical Flash Website by presenting the portfolio of a fellow photographer. It adopted all the best practices available on the Internet and became one of the best solutions among the growing number of similar libraries.

Lately I have been posting some things that I see on the Digg web site. It is my hope that this will show clients or people that are interested in obtaining my services what makes the creative timer tick around here. I don’t just read books on programing all the time to make your project come to live. The following article is just one of many things that will catch my eye during the day and bring some kind of inspiration to a project that I am working on at the time. I am going to do my best in the coming months to post stuff on my blog that will not just talk about Flash animation and design but things that I find creative, interesting, funny, and maybe some tid bit of knowledge I learn about programing or maybe some little trick or tip.

So here is a great article that I found on digg about a aspiring photographer. Just a great read and what grabbed me the most was that this guy is not a full time photographer, in the sense he does not earn a full time paycheck. He is a game programmer / turned photographer. The work that he produces is amazing.
What I really find inspiring is how his computer programing thinking and also a small disability contribute to his work.

Trey Ratcliff is an amazing photographer making a name for himself with a slew of amazing photographs that have populated Digg
’s front page so much that he has been dubbed “Digg’s favorite HDR photographer�. The man behind the camera just might be more fascinating than the photographs that he is famous for.

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Need a 12 hour lantern, but all you have are some glow sticks and a Blendtec Total Blender? Well look no further MacGyver, that’s all you need.

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However, this may be a good enough reason to shake the sh*t out of them!

Saw this on Digg. I don’t know how this guy did not loss his mind! I have two kids myself and I am a Mac user. it pains my heart to see this. It is somewhat funny too. Glad it did not happen to me.

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Here is a cool project that I finished up a few weeks ago. Country Artist John Adam Murph called me to do a site for him around the end of last year. He had some idea as to the look that he wanted for the site. Flash projects are cool but Flash isn’t always the best program for getting some animation effects that you want. Wile I was designing this smokey themed site I had the idea that I wanted some smoke to fill the page whenever a user clicked on a button that I set up. It is kind of hidden in the lower right hand section of the site. See if you can find it and click it to load some smoke to the stage. Click it again to make it go away.

What I did is create the effect in Adobe After Effects and exported the loop as a swf file. I am loading the swf as an external swf. The smoke swf is around 1MB in size so is it really just for fun and to add a little coolness to the project.

Let me know what you guys think.

When you go to the site look for the “Load Smoke” Button in the lower right corner. http://johnadammurph.com