I received a cool poster through the post today, courtesy of Ethan Eismann, who works for Adobe.
http://hello.eboy.com/eboy/2008/02/25/poster-for-adobe-air-launch/
Ethan ran a mini-competition on his blog asking for the best comments on “optimisation” and I got an email a few days later saying mine was the best out of 4. I had not realised it was a competition I was just having a slightly sarcastic rant on a pet subject of mine 
Anyway, it made my day and I have a limited piece of artwork by Eboy now too!
Tip of the day for Dreamweaver users.
If you are doing a search and replace for ellipses with the corresponding HTML entity - … - remember to turn off the “Regular Expressions” check box, especially if you have selected “Entire Current Local Site.
Otherwise your computer sits there and starts making pretty patterns and if you go and make a cup of tea, it might make it through your entire site.
I finished a big project last week for Surfers Against Sewage called Save Our Seas.
This is another free educational resource like Operation Beach Clean which I had done previously.
Anyway, this time I did some animation myself and also re-used part of the intro from OBC, adding some extra audio and lip-sync’ing to this.
The Flash is a bit more modular this time, so we can easily create new content and add it to the XML sitemap to be loaded in. It still runs in AS2 as it borrows some code from the OBC project.
Some cool stuff which helped a lot: the XPath implementation from XFactorStudio, Jobe Makar’s Wordsearch game from Flash MX Game Programming Demystified was ported to AS2 and I used the Tween Lite package for the first time when the ripple transitions started slowing everything down - nice and simple. I also had some great help from the FlashCoders mailing list with some tricky problems, cheers guys.
Anyway, check out the finished project and if you know any teachers who might like it, let them know too.
http://www.sas.org.uk/education/sos/
Tip - don’t launch PDF documents as a URL in Firefox, Acrobat Reader keeps hanging the browser for some reason…
Here is some code to help:
Quick Code
private function _showPDF(_pdfURL:String):Void {
//use JS to pass in the browser variable to Flash: - http://www.quirksmode.org/js/detect.html
var browser:String = String(_root.browser).toLowerCase();
if ("firefox" == browser) {
_useDownload = true;
}
if (true == _useDownload) {
var fileRef:FileReference = new FileReference();
if(!fileRef.download(_pdfURL)) {
trace("Failed to download.");
}
} else {
getURL(_pdfURLl, "_blank");
}
}
