visualcondition blog - flash & ruby on rails

Whew, Twease 1.1 is hot off the desktop of yours truly. Been working on this one off and on for a few weeks, and it’s a nice little upgrade.

Twease Homepage

We’ve got new Array tweening features, Penner Easing Equations are now included, some bug fixes and optimizations, and a new beta Extend class. This Extend class is still an infant, and only really provides a getTweens function for now. We’re also under 200 lines of code for the core Twease class now, and still only 2k, even with new features!

Expect color and bezier in 1.2 as well as polishing off the Extend class and squashing any bugs that come up in this release. 1.3 I’m thinking will be the filter tweening release. After that, it’s pretty much done.

I know I know, AS3 AS3. I haven’t even touched it yet, I’ve been a bit busy ya know?

For an upcoming non-Flash project, that’s akin to classifieds/ebay flavor, I’ve decided to give Ruby on Rails a shot - instead of reaching for PHP, which I’m quasi-comfertable with. I’m not a php guru by any means, and what I do know ties in with AS2 fairly well, so I can do what I need to do in php with very little fuss. After all, I did make the Desuade site in php just a few months ago, and I was fairly comfortable working with it. And since php is so popular, if I had a question, just give’er a Google and thar she be: instant answers.

This project is a fairly involved project, and under a tight deadline, so one would think using something I know and am comfortable with, would allow me to get right in and get it done fast. Maybe. But what if there’s something I could use to get it done even faster? Pre-made scripts and templates for php are a dime a dozen, I could just pay a few bucks and download something and go from there, but you all know me better than to cheat like that. Escaping from the back of my mind, a voice, very passionate and excited, was yelling to me to take a gamble with RoR. This voice was yelling, almost screaming to give it a try, but it was subdued to a whisper over the course of months due to the amount on my plate.

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I’m finally back home after a pretty exciting trip visiting family in New York. Vacation’s over, so it’s back to work. Expect a lot more activity on my blog and my projects in general.

This release fixes critical bugs for Twease.

1st bug - Garbage collection would set the Twease engine active to false, preventing any new tweens from running. New tweens now detect this and start the engine back up again.

2nd bug - This one was quite silly and should have never been published. Delays and cycles would not work together, and I think delays cut off a tween’s total time. I think this came about during optimizations.

This update is highly recommended and is pretty much mandatory for proper engine function.

Hey everyone.

I’m going to be taking a much needed break starting this Monday up in New York. So I hope that means there will be a lack of posts as well as coding and design. Sigh, we’ll see how that goes knowing me. I’ll still be accessable, as I’ll still have to take care of business, but don’t expect anything new for at least a month.

Time to start actually enjoying the summer

Twease is a new tweening engine and sequencer I’ve just developed for AS2.

So check it out, and enjoy!

http://play.visualcondition.com/twease/

Paprvision 3d

The mailing list has been almost annoyingly busy, so these guys have been hard at work. I don’t even have time to play with it, but they’ve done some really great things with Flash.

I discovered a neat little trick when using the ‘add’ blendmode. Normally, the lighter the background, the less visible it is, and using it on a white background will make it invisible. There’s a nice little trick I found to work around this.

All you do is apply a ‘drop shadow’ filter to the movieclip, and set the quality to low, and blur, strength, and distance to 0. This in effect will render no drop shadow, but you will see your movieclip without any loss in visibility.

This will be especially useful in things like, oh I don’t know, particle effects?

http://www.gskinner.com/talks/50reasonsAS3/

I didn’t really even know what half of any of that meant, but boy do I want it! I thought I knew most of the new things, but that really helped bring it together.

Seriously though, I can’t wait to get into AS3.

Pretty crazy at the end.

The mind is so powerful, yet so vulnerable. It almost makes you scarred.