Playing with lines, shapes and time

22.10.10 George Profenza

I was playing with shapes and the timeline in Flash and liked the shapes that emerged when using the Onion Skin option. It's like freezing/collapsing time into one.

So I wrote a little script in the morning that would mimic that Onion Skin option but would actually store a graphic. It's far from finished and it currently only supports strokes and only works in CS5 for now, but feel free to download it.

Here's a little graphic I made using the script to freeze a bit of John Whitney's Arabesque.

Also there's a quick screencast to illustrate usage. It's pretty basic at the moment:

  1. Create your line shape tween
  2. Select the frame range. You can do that by just selecting the shape tween layer.
  3. Run the script via Commands > Copy Shape Tween As Graphic

In conclusion, have fun making complex graphics with very basic shape tweens.

And make sure you check out John Whitney's awesome animations, if you haven't already.

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star 2 star 1 Whitney Tween Whitney Tween 2 Whitney Tween 3




10,240 bytes

22.10.10 Max Novakovic

In August I entered the 10K apart competition which asked developers to 'inspire the web with just 10k'. Entries had to be under 10 kilobytes and work in IE9, Firefox and Chrome/Safari. I decided to create a customisable home page, similar to iGoogle or Netvibes. It was probably one of the less interesting entries but nonetheless it proved a good way to learn about code optimisation and compression. You can view my entry here.

The winning entry was Sinuous a cross platform canvas game. You can play it using your mouse or you can touch using a touch screen device such as the iPhone/iPad/Android. It's a good entry and I can see why it won due to it supporting mobile devices and being a simple idea implemented well. Other notable entries are an old-school adventure game, Fontanero, which compressed it's code into a PNG and then decompressed it from the canvas at run-time - a method first written about by Nihilogic. And Filterrific, an image manipulation app written by Nihilogic that allows you to apply various filters to an image such as blur, fisheye, posterize, etc.

You can view my entry online here and you can also see the entry on the 10K Apart website here. The entry consisted of a search bar for Google, three types of widgets; RSS feeds, Twitter user streams and Flickr tag searches, a customisable background image and a customisable greeting. Everything is stored in localStorage which means it will be remembered after you close your browser. The biggest challenge was finding the balance between the file size and the functionality and deciding what should be included and what was unnecessary. In total the project size was 10,223 bytes which is 17 bytes under. Adding 17 bytes to the project would be equivalent of including 'if(some_variable)' in the code. You can download the uncompressed source code here.

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Screenshot of my entry The winner: Sinuous




The dummy imagery that built this blog

22.10.10 Ollie Bourne

This is a post dedicated to the unsung scaffolding that helped secure the foundations of this blog when everything else was uncertain.

This a post dedicated to the imagery and the ipsum that brightened and inspired my developing days.

Unfortunately many of the author's names have been lost many hyperlinks back.

1 - Unknown Source: This image clearly springs from a mind with great purity of vision and it makes me very happy every time I see it

2 - This image is taken from Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey and is either a shopped image from the film or a picture taken on set. I feel it speaks for itself.

3 - This is a photo by Daido Moriyama of a whale (presumably dead) being hauled somewhere or other.

4 - Unknown Source: It's hard to tell whether this dog is smiling, I like to think that it is smiling.

5 - Presumably from American Psycho: It may be a still from the film or a press shot.

6 - Unknown Source: I revere this man

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Cat arse Weird Bunny Whale Haul Squashed Dog Psycho Bellyflop




Flashing on the Beach

21.10.10 Greg Danford

Not only Flashing, but singing and dancing too.

For some reason we agreed to open this year's Flash on the Beach conference in Brighton - singing and dancing in front of 1000 people in the Dome Theatre.

In the week when Apple announced that they were going to stop treating the Flash community like 3rd Class citizens, and start giving us the 2nd Class treatment that we deserve - our homage to Steve Jobs fell beautifully into place...

A Back Street Boys parody seemed like a good idea. In fact, lots of things SEEMED like a good idea but, you know what?, it all worked out brilliantly and we loved every minute of it. And, thanks to John Davey @ FOTB, we might just have next year's X Factor. Just you wait ;)

Flickr pics

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disturb media do the backstreet boys at flash on the beach 2010




Out of The Shadows

18.10.10 Jace Turner

Last week i had my camera out the window again. Not in a pervy way but checking out shadows (oooh how exciting). I live on Camden Road and have an amazing view from opposite the station. There is a large empty space of flat ground on the corner near me and the sun comes across this area in the morning, creating really harsh shadows as people go to work.

I've been capturing some of these and exaggerating it with a bit of retouching. Camden road Rail Bridge casts a shadow running from top to bottom of the composition. I feel it kind of grounds people in the image (just in case you were wondering what the more vertical line is - then again you probably weren't).

The actual images are a lot bigger but here's a small crop. I will be continuing this exploration in the next few weeks, as the sun seems really low in the sky at the mo and comes straight down my road.

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Out of The Shadows Out of The Shadows Out of The Shadows