bumpslide.com/blog

FTween is a simple tweening utility designed to fill a need not met by the Penner family of time-based tweening solutions. The problem case is one where a target is constantly moving and/or changing at unexpected times. The Penner equations rely on the assumption that a tween will last for a known length of time, but it is often the case that I simply want a smooth transition from one state to another. Tweening content for smooth scrolling and animating a tree menu are two common examples where time-based tweening can have stuttering or less than desirable result. When animating a sprite in such as way that it follows a moving target, Penner tweens don’t work at all.

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MTASC, the open-source Actionscript compiler, has become an essential part of my daily routine. I used it for a long time with custom built BAT files that would inject compiled code into my library SWF’s, but now I can do all of this with FlashDevelop. There are other editors out there, but FlashDevelop is my current IDE of choice, and it just so happens that it has a cute little feature I’ve not seen elsewhere. That feature is called “Quick MTASC Build”, and I use it all the time to build quick test SWF’s without ever having to open up the Flash authoring environment. I refer to these FLA-less SWF’s as MTASC Applets.

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I am now sharing an office space with my friend and former Second Story colleague, JD Hooge. After a month of work, we have finally moved into the little corner office at SE 6th and Alder here in Portland. We’re one of a handful of tenants occupying spaces above the Melody Ballroom where they have a strange combination of wedding receptions, office parties, and church services a couple times a week.

Since signing the lease, we ripped up all the carpet, refinished the floors (with the help of some guys with big sanders), and put in a few days worth of patching and painting the walls. We’re still acquiring necessities, but I’m officially working from an office again instead of that spare bedroom where my desk was 2 feet from the ironing board. I can proudly turn on the webcam again when Skype-ing.

Thanks to JD, pictures are on flickr.

Much has been written about smoothing dynamically loaded bitmaps in Flash 8. But, just in case you missed it, here’s the short version: Flash 8 allows you to smooth dynamically loaded images such as JPG’s at runtime by taking a snapshot of the image using BitmapData and redrawing it on to a MovieClip with smoothing applied..

It’s one of those things you may never have realized you were missing until now.

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Hi, my name is David Knape, and I’m starting yet another blog in order to share my thoughts on Flash development and related topics. I am a programmer, not an animator or timeline tweener, so you will see more code here than anything else.
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