Cool and surprising!

I like this one -- and don't know how much longer it will be live. But it certainly is creative:

http://producten.hema.nl/

PDF on AIR

Crash course on AIR: http://theflashblog.com/?p=342

Google Sites is launched

A new entry in the world of collaborative workspaces: http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9881487-2.html

More on 3D Flash

I have never been that interested in experimenting with 3D flash -- even though people have been working with it for several years. But it there are a couple of 3D engines that are looking pretty exciting in their possibilities. Here are a few more sites/example that are worth checking out:

Using the Away3D engine:

http://www.closier.nl/playground/extrude1.html

http://www.fifastreet3.com/flash/wk/player.asp

Referencing a class function from inside of an XML object in AS2

Ok-- so this one tripped me up tonight. I'm converting an AS1 program to AS2 and thus moving functions into classes. So far so good, until I try to get a function to trigger after an XML.onLoad event:

myClass{
 var myXML:XML = new XML();
 myXML.onLoad = function(){
      myFunction();
 }
 myXML.load("myXML.xml");

 public myFunction ():void{
   // function contents
 }
}

-- but when tried to run this, I had no luck. You also can't use "this.myFunction()" either since "this" actually refers to the results that have been loaded. So, after a bit of Googling I found this Blog post from 2004:

http://www.bit-101.com/blog/?p=525

It turns out that the easiest way to fix it is to create a var inside the class that refers to "this" like so:

var myClass:Object = this;

Then you can simply run the example above and everything is hunky dory again ;-)

Very cool flash sites using papervision3D

Papervision3D is a 3D engine for Flash. Here are a few great examples of what can be done with it:

http://www.whitevoid.com/application

Even 3D video -- one word -- WOW:

http://adn.blam.be/papervision/

and a new version of pool:

http://www.markfennell.com/flash/pool/

Scribd launches iPaper

When I first saw Scribed about a year ago I was immediately impressed how they were using "FlashPaper" -- a flash-based alternative to PDF that Macromedia developed before being bought out by Adobe. One of my real concerns with the merger was the future of FlashPaper. Well, it appears that the popularity of Scribd attests to the value of the FlashPaper model and to further illustrate the point they have just released their own version of it in iPaper. This is simply an awesome next step. Check it out:

Using Flex Builder 2

Awesome wallpapers

Here is a blog post with a great selection of desktop wallpapers >

Flash AS3 -- keylistener problems

Here is an odd one. Using Flash CS3 I am trying to capture keystrokes. But I have not been able to make it work when testing the movie within Flash -- the key press is only registered once and a while. Instead I find that the focus tends to go to the Flash CS3 interface itself (causing the tool bar to change items instead) So, I need to test the behavior by opening the .swf directly.

BTW, the forward and back buttons work fine--but the character keys are very buggy.

Very wierd. I must be doing SOMETHING wrong?