DrPunchBlog

I’ve been modifying my YouTube Video Class…
and I really wanted to experiment with the Bitmap Classes as well. The result is pretty dandy.

The above effect (Shower Door) is my favorite, it consistently looks the best on all videos. It overlays a random pattern of pixels from previous frames over the live video feed and blurs them at random.

Go to the next page to see 3 other settings: Rain, Embiggen, and Sunny Day.

→ You want this so bad.

I started coding flash with Flash 3 (before ActionScript).
It is a few years later, and we have evolved from ActionScript 1.0 (1999) to ActionScript 3.0 (2006) and I have been reading about ActionScript 4.0 for over 2 years… However, it looks like for what I do, I will be stuck in ActionScript 2.0 for the remainder of my career.

Personally, I have a real issue with using software or code once it is old enough to be in school. There have been changes, and (hopefully) improvements in technology between the time of a product’s launch and now–regardless of the newness of the product. When the iPhone was released you wouldn’t expect Apple to throw up it’s hands and proclaim “That is good enough, we’ve done the best we could, and there will never be a need to improve on that idea.” However, this is not the always the case with web technologies, especially when it comes to adapting new ideas.

Imagine if you worked at a TV Production Studio and the boss of the company said, “I have decided not to film anything in HDTV. We have run the numbers, and it means that we would have to buy new cameras, change the way we do hair and make-up, and upgrade our editing equipment. It is too expensive.” You would think your boss was a moron, and immediately start looking for another company because staying there would mark the death of your career. Now imagine that the company you worked at was NBC or HBO or Disney, and they decided that HDTV was a fad and not worth putting the effort into. That doesn’t change your job, that changes the landscape.
→ Surrender.

This is a trimmed down version of my template banner class in ActionScript 3.0.
I hope someone out there in this cold, dark world finds it of use.

• Automatically adds the generic clickTag
• Automatically adds a 1 pixel black border
• Checks for a movieclip named “CTA” to animate when the banner is rolled over
• Pre-loader so the banner does not play until it is fully loaded and the functions are ready
• Generates a sample report after the banner is run

→ Wow, there is more!

This is code you will need more often then you would think, counting down to something in a banner.
Usually, this is for a movie coming out to video, or a park opening, or what-have you.

→ Because I say, ‘click’.

This was my DrPunchman game, that I made a few years ago: 6 levels of Mario-type action.

[ click to play ]

My first site was www.get-soiled.com. It did pretty well for itself, but being the early days of the Internet, the domain name slipped out of my hands and well… now it’s drpunchman.com or bust! What Get-Soiled had, and there isn’t much of here, was GAMES! ActionScript 1 and 2 games (yes I was nominated for 3 Emmys for stupid online games – to tell you what the Internet was like back in the day).

One of my favorite “soiled” games was my take on the old favorite Tetris. This was dedicated to my old chum Adam from grade school. We feared we were going to lose him to Tetris, so I made a version of the game that was increasingly annoying: random pictures in the background, color bars that came in from the sides… it is a wonderful interactive art disaster.

Read the full post to play the game.

→ Click for your reward!

I don’t know why I am still building things in AS2… But I keep getting asked to do it, so I’ll just keep trucking.
Here is a simple AS2 Typewriter effect:

→ Gimme more.

Can’t get your flash to show you what is up? You can set your flash caching on a per-site or global basis here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html

Yup, it is a totally lame solution to a nagging problem.

Also, using FireFox you can:

1. Open a new tab in Firefox.
2. Type about:config in the url.
3. Agree to the warning.
4. Change the property browser.cache.disk.enable and set it to false.
5. While you are at it, browser.cache.disk.capacity set this to something low like: 512

Personally, I like opening a fresh clean version of a website each time. And I am usually on  a good network connection so why shouldn’t I? It’s not like I’m using a 56k modem, and need to keep these files around! I do a lot of development, I need fresh, crisp, code shown to me with every refresh.

Also it is a good idea to go here: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/155/tn_15507.html and test your flash version settings.

If you are needing to test your banners, I suggest you try one of these tools:
[ Double Click Validator ] or [ AdoptStools ]

…because it just won’t die, here is some more AS2 for you.

stop();
function playClip(){gotoAndPlay(2)};
function newPrct()
{
	var prct:Number = Math.floor( ( this.getBytesLoaded() / this.getBytesTotal() ) * 100 );
	( prct == 100 )?playClip():setTimeout( function(){newPrct();},250 );
}
newPrct();

I go into more detail after the jump.
→ Read more.

This is a simple FaceBook Widget I did for Stan Bush to help promote his fantastic album: “In This Life”. It’s fairly straight forward: Gigya Social, Buy on iTunes, playlist and images are from XML, and there are about 4-5 visualizations.

→ Read the rest.

I’m tired of typing this over and over. CS5 does this for you, but I have a feeling that I will be using CS4 at work for at least another year before we do an official upgrade. And that’s fine, Cs5 as of today’s date still crashes a lot- so after they work out the bugs and send out some patches, it will all be groovy, till then here is my simple AS3 class layout.

package com.drpunchlogic
{
	// 	-- IMPORT

	public class classname extends MovieClip
	{

		// 		-- VARS

/*
--------------------------------------------------------
	SET IT UP
--------------------------------------------------------
*/
		public function classname( )
		{	

		}

/*
--------------------------------------------------------
	START CLASS
--------------------------------------------------------
*/
		// INIT
		public function init(e:Event) : void
		{

		}

// 	-- END CLASS
	}
// 	-- END PACKAGE
}