Latest News from Guy Watson

Flash CS4 “Paste in place” Gotcha

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 19:46:31 EST

Ive been banging my head against a brick wall for the past hour trying to work out why Flash CS4 was messing up the designers 3d animation when i copied it from his flash document to my much tidier and organised flash document. I never use Paste in Center, infact its hardwired in my [...]

Pretty Preloaders

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 01:32:46 EST

A good Flash Designer will put alot of effort into a preloader, knowing that it may be viewed for sometime while the site loads in the background. Its eye candy to keep the viewer occupied during the times when content or data is being loaded in. Big Spaceship have put together a site to [...]

Astro: Flash Player 10 - Available Now!

Thu, 15 May 2008 01:07:28 EDT

Today Adobe have released a beta version of Flash Player 10 to the masses. Its available to download now on Adobe Labs, there you will find various demos that showcase some of the new features in the player. The latest player features some of the most requested features since the release of the last version of [...]

Adobe MAKE SOME NOISE

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 02:31:58 EDT

Andre Michelle is leading a campaign called Adobe MAKE SOME NOISE that is calling for Adobe to take some action and fix a pretty big problem with the Actionscript Sound API in the latest Flash Player and also to rally together support to show Adobe that alot of people need/want more control over sound with [...]

Site is being updated!

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 21:57:02 EST

Sorry for the mess people, im re-jiggerising things around and getting the first magazine article together. It turns out wordpress doesn’t like to have two seperate instances running on the same server, using the same database, in seperate folders (it gets seriously confused), also why cant i rename any of the standard wordpress files? i [...]

Delete Empty Keyframes

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 14:50:31 EST

This Command will delete all empty keyframes on the selected layers. This is useful when you get a messy file from your designers and want to tidy it up a bit.

Auto Save

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 14:47:39 EST

This extension adds a new panel to the Flash Authoring Tool, that enables you to specify an interval for automatically saving the document you are presently working on. Intervals can be set in minutes or hours.

JSFL FileSystem API

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 14:46:40 EST

This extension adds a new FileSystem object to the JSAPI which contains 23 new JSFL functions that allow you to modify/access the local FileSystem in your JSFL scripts. You can for example write to the registry using JSFL, execute external applications and so on… Documentation is provided for each of the new functions in the Help [...]

Create Frame Sequence

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 14:44:45 EST

This extension adds a new command to the Commands menu in the Flash Authoring Tool that will take the frames you have selected and add them to a new layer in the order you selected them, one by one.

Batch Run

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 14:40:56 EST

This extension adds a new command to the Commands menu in the Flash Authoring Tool that will open a list of flash documents, run a jsfl script for that document, and then optionally save that document and close it. All of which is customised through a GUI.

Flash Player 8: Using Bitmap Caching in Flash

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 15:00:00 EST

As most of you know, Flash began as a tool for creating vector animations on the web. Flash Player was designed specifically as a lightweight animation viewer to display moving vector objects, which are, in their simplest form, mathematical equations that describe complex shapes made up of points, lines, curves, and fills.

Cover Story: How to Increase the Frame Rates of Your Flash Movies

Tue, 25 Oct 2005 06:45:00 EDT

Flash in its essence began as a tool for creating vector animations on the web. The Flash Player was designed specifically as a lightweight animation viewer to display those moving vector objects which are in their simplest form, mathematical equations that describe complex shapes made up of points, lines, curves and fills. However, nowadays developers and designers are using Flash to do a lot more than just animation, today we see Flash being used for everything from interactive banner ads to games and large applications with complex user interfaces. We are now pushing Flash to its limits and our frame rates are starting to suffer as we continue to develop content that is more application centric.

5 Flash Tips: onLoad Event Handler Not Working With loadMovie?

Wed, 17 Aug 2005 09:30:00 EDT

I have heard so many people moan on the many community forums and mailing lists about the onLoad event handler not working and although I have already posted a fix for the problem.

Tree Component - Horizontal Scrolling

Wed, 15 Jun 2005 10:00:00 EDT

I've been playing around with the Tree Component in great depth and have found a few discrepancies which I feel are major pit holes. After a lot of searching, it was also clear that many other developers have come across the same issues. My main gripe: the tree component's support for horizontal scrolling is not very useful. I expected it to work like the ScrollPane's horizontal scrollbar, but it doesn't.

Extending Flash

Wed, 19 May 2004 00:00:00 EDT

Part 1 of this article (Vol. 1, issue 3) covered a general introduction to the Extensibility Layer and discussed the fundamental DOM and the relationship between different parts of a Flash document and their associated objects. It introduced the History panel and showed you how to build your own Flash panels. In this installment we take an in-depth look at XML2UI and Flash dialog boxes.

Introducing JSap1 Part 1

Tue, 02 Mar 2004 00:00:00 EST

With any new version of a software product, a whole new host of features is introduced - Macromedia Flash MX 2004 is no different. It has been rebuilt for the ground up with a new JavaScript API (Flash JavaScript), which enables developers to extend the functionality of the authoring tool. This two part article explores features of this new architecture.