Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category

Illustration: Mr. Noodle (vectors in Flash)

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

Mr Noodle vectorJust finished up a vector version of my little machine-gun toting rabbit, Mr. Noodle. I had originally planned a game for him where he uses a ‘holy’ gun to kill shades & phantoms that have overtaken the surrounding woodland. We’ll see if I ever get there.

Anyways, enjoy a special holiday treat of Mr. Noodle at most desktop sizes!
View it larger here.

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Flash : Native Image Compression Stats

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
flashHead Flash : Native Image Compression Stats

For those looking to optimize file-size inside (and outside) of your Flash movie, I have done a fairly in-depth amount of research into which formats Flash handles best once loaded into the main time-line. While I know that many no longer do this, it is ideal for those of us who still do animated presentations on the time-line. I was always under the impression that PNG-24 was the smallest file-size on publish, but I was wrong.

After extensive testing, a flattened LZW TIF with default Photoshop settings seemed to compress the best for images without transparency & take up the least amount of file-size on disk. But, for those transparent image needs PNG-24 (using the Save for Web dialog) won out.

I also noticed, just switching the AS library from 2 – 3 barely increased file-size on publish as well. The same was true with activating JPG de-blocking.

Obviously, if you are remotely loading your images, the smallest file-size image wins that test.

Get the PDF of the breakdown here.

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Flash : Pre-loading Issues

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
flashHead Flash : Pre loading Issues

I recently ran into a perplexing issue. I had used my standard pre-loading code in AS3 (using .bytesTotal) in a media loading project. This had never been an issue before, but at work we recently moved to a new server solution. All of the sudden, IE (of course) stopped loading a value into the .bytesTotal. My loader was returning NaN. It still completed its ‘loaded’ actions, but wouldn’t track the active loading. Then I tested it in Chrome & Safari, and it was happening there too! Firefox was fine however. Now I was really confused. So I did a bit of research…

Apparently, I’m not alone. The issue seeming stems from files being served up with GZIP compression before being sent to the Flash Player. We had the server solution turn off GZIP compression & Voila! It worked.

Hope this helps someone, like it did me!

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Development : IE Cookie Issues

Monday, November 9th, 2009
Cookie icon by Everaldo

Cookie icon by Everaldo

Just ran into an interesting issue in browser issue in storing cookies. Apparently, the standards-compliant way to code a cookie is “max-age”. But, on testing in IE (any version, any recent OS), the cookie will be active (not write however) for the current session, but once the browser is closed, then re-opened, all the current cookies will be gone.

Upon further investigation, the cookie tag “max-age” does not work in IE. The old tag “expires” must be used instead. This works in all current browsers. Hope this helps!

Correct!

document.cookie="value=test;expires="+expDate+";path=/";

Incorrect
document.cookie="value=test;max-age="+expDate+";path=/";

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Flash: Preferred Tween Engine

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
flashHead Flash: Preferred Tween Engine

tweenmax Flash: Preferred Tween EngineThere are quite a few tweening engines out there, but I haven’t found any as useful, speedy or efficient as TweenLite (~3k), and its more robust brother TweenMax(~8k). I’ve been using this one for about 3 months solidly over a year now & have no complaints. If you haven’t decided on a tweening engine for yourself yet, I would check it out.

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