Connecting a Wii remote to my PC for use in flash is something that I’ve been meaning to do for a while – however, when I built my PC the one thing I forgot was bluetooth. Over the holidays, I remedied this situation by picking up this USB bluetooth dongle, and was happy to find that setting up WiiFlash Server couldn’t be easier. The dongle I linked to comes with BlueSoleil bluetooth software, which does just fine for connecting to a controller.
I found this handy guide linked to on the WiiFlash homepage and was up and running in no time. I had one problem in that the way that I connected to the remote was different to the one documented at the link, so I just wanted to go over the slight differences here, in case anyone else is having trouble.
This is a little niggling problem that I find myself rediscovering every now and then when working with dynamic text – particularly dynamic text as part of an interface. When you have a movieclip with buttonMode set to true, you expect the cursor to change to a pointing hand whenever it is over any part of the movieclip, as in this example:
Mousing over the button gives you a hand cursor, updates the button to it’s ‘over’ state, and changes the text at the top, all as expected. The problems arise when using a dynamic text field to label the button, like this:
Mousing over the button still changes it’s state and alters the text, and to a certain extent changes the cursor. However, when you move the cursor over the text field it goes back to a regular arrow, despite the fact that flash can clearly tell it’s still over the button, as evidenced by the ‘over’ state of the button, and the top text field.
Hello, happy new year, and welcome to the new face of EddyB.co.uk. It’s soon to be a brand new year, and to celebrate I’ve given the site and the blog a bit of a face lift, and done some tuning behind the scenes. I thought it was about time to implement some of the features on my ‘to do’ list, and what better way to do it than to completely redesign and rebuild!
So, what’s new on the site? Well to start with, the old site was starting to feel a bit static. The static home page – albeit with a nice little bit of interactive flash – didn’t really seem fitting for an interactive designer, so I’ve livened things up a bit. The new flash showcase pulls all of it’s information from an XML file and external images, allowing me to update it a lot more easily and frequently than before. Another dynamic addition to the new home page is the ‘latest’ section, designed to keep you up to date with what’s going on all over the site. It pulls in information from twitter, from the portfolio, and from here on the blog, to give you a bit of a snapshot of what’s going on.
Delving a bit deeper into the site, the new portfolio really puts the old one to shame! With a collapsible jQuery menu keeping everything nice and organised, and a stylish jQuery gallery giving you a closer look at some of my projects.
Here on the blog, things are looking a lot more consistent than they used to, with the design from the rest of the site being fitted neatly over the always excellent WordPress back end to give a seamless and simple blog experience.
Speaking of the blog, I have a lot of ideas for things to write about in the new year, so if you’re interested in Flash and Actionscript, keep checking back for much more regular updates than ever before!
Recently I’ve been looking at the APIs of a couple of websites, Twitter and Flickr. This post will be focusing on flickr, and the little app that I created using Actionscript 3 and the Flickr API.
The Flickr API really makes it easy to access all of the images on the site, and all of the information that it stores about them, using a series of http requests for everything from searching to obtaining geotag information. There are a number of API kits available, but the base Flickr API is so simple that on a small project such as this one it was just as easy to use as it would have been to learn to use one of the kits.
Every once in a while, a few friends come round to the flat to play board games, the standard game being Settler’s of Catan. Most of us being geeks, at some point in the evening someone usually mentions an idea for a way to integrate some sort of technology into the proceedings, such as a glass topped board game table with LED strips for roads. This is what prompted the following project.
As an exercise in OOP in AS3, I decided to try and recreate the game in flash. This is the first step, the random board generation. Read the rest of this entry »
