Video animation for Times Square Nasdaq screen

Still from live feed of CMM video on Nasdaq screen in Times Square 6-25-09.

A client of ours, Sarah Fey, came to us with a rush video animation job. When we found out the video would be displayed on the huge Nasdaq video billboard in Time Square, we couldn’t pass it up. To watch the final video and footage from the live feed, click here. To learn more about the process of producing the video, read on…

Advantages of Using Flash Catalyst

We have been currently working on a desktop application with customized components. As you may be aware without Flash Catalyst the work flow for creating an application with customized components can be time consuming and very demanding. You can customize the components using Flex Style Explorer or customize the templates offered in Illustrator, Fireworks, Flash or PhotoShop. However, Adobe is now bridging the gap between design and development to make it easier. Flash Catalyst Beta has just been released. Is it a disappointment or not? There are many opinions out there. In this post we will review some of the advantages of Flash Catalyst and what it has to offer.

Flash Builder 4 beta Released

We had been waiting in eager anticipation through the first half of this year for it to finally arrive. All indications were that we would be well adjusted to our new work flow by the time summer rolled around for sure, enjoying all the new tooling and features of Flex 4, round tripping some super-duper new skins with our design team via Catalyst, and improving our productivity on the whole. But as winter gave way to spring, our excitement began to wane until I had all but forgotten about the coming of this new generation of Flex. When suddenly, with almost no warning whatsoever, it was upon us… the new Flash Builder 4 beta, code named ‘Gumbo’.

Embedding Irregular Fonts in Flex 3

Often in programming, what seems to be a simple task can trip you up. Yesterday I was trying to embed the font Helvetic Neue LT Com Bold 77 in a css style sheet for a project of ours. After about 20 minutes of trying different methods to get the project to compile without any errors, I came across the following method:

Graphical User Interface Design

Currently, we are working on building a new desktop application. It all begins with good planning and beautiful design. Here are four steps with tips that will help designers design a successful application.

Warning: Filter will not render. are too large to be draw

If you are looking at this error in your flex compiler, make sure that the DisplayObject that you are trying to add to the stage is subclassing UIComponent and not UIMovieClip. The two are nearly interchangeable, yet the UIMovieClip needs specific bounds.

Happy Coding!

Full Browser Flash with changing background color and automatic scrollbars

Bowen and Company website, design by Florio Design

I finished a Flash animation for a client in which the background color of the movie fades from brown to white. The client liked it but decided that he would like the background of the browser (behind the embedded Flash movie) to change as well.

I figured the best solution would be to make the Flash movie full browser. So here is the solution that I came up with:

Using the Factory Method Pattern

 Introduction to a Classic OOP Design Pattern

Throughout my career as a developer I have had the occasion to use the Factory Method Pattern when appropriate, and grown to rely on it extensively in recent months as several projects have dictated. I find this pattern to be extremely useful in creating a loosely-coupled application architecture, which (as we’ve all been indoctrinated) is the cornerstone of well designed apps. It is my hope that this introduction will illuminate this pattern for the uninitiated. Even if you don’t find an immediate application for the Factory Pattern, just understanding the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of this design can be important in grasping the importance of the “open-closed” principle, and will help you to write better code. 

Let me start off by giving the standard text-book definition of the pattern:

The Factory Pattern “…define[s] an interface for creating an object, but allows the subclasses decide which class to instantiate. The Factory method lets a class defer instantiation to subclasses.” 

Flex Style Explorer

An important part of developing for Flex is skinning or styling the components. Flex has a great set of components with a default appearance. If you want to customize the components to style them without loosing time use Flex Style Explorer. Flex Style Explorer has a very nice visual dashboard which allows you to edit colors, padding, corner radius, fonts, shadows, alpha, background, and more. Once you edit a component it creates the CSS for you and you can export the CSS. This is great for any designer or developer. You do not need Flex to use Flex Style Explorer. You can use Flex Style Explorer in Fireworks CS3 or on the web. This article will cover new features, the advantages, the disadvantages, and exploring components in Flex Style Explorer.

AS3 Tutorial – The Singleton Pattern

One of the most important patterns that we use over here is the Singleton. It’s used when you need to restrict use of a class to one or only one instance. This comes in handy when you are casting things like application wide settings, or if you are building something like a logging service. There is a bit of disagreement on the use of the singleton, but it really boils down to two questions:

• Will you use this class exactly the same way?
• Will you only ever need only one instance of this class?

If you answer yes to these two questions, you might have the case to build a singleton. – So here is how you go about doing it in AS3 -it’s a bit tricksy ’cause as3 has no private constructors: