A bit more than a year ago I launched flcodr. It was designed to be a way for me to learn PHP and also organise my actionscript snippets. I decided to open this up to the world so that people could share. The site is by no means perfect and it was my plan to rewrite the vast majority of it (which I have started). I have been tied up with other projects and moving house since then and flcodr has taken a bit of a back seat, but now that I have more time I will be able to make flcodr better and into the kind of site that you all will want to keep using, hold tight as it will be worth it!!

At Flash Camp Birmingham that is: I don’t really need to say more than that I don’t think. It promises to be a great day out and hopefully i’ll have a new version of flCodr up for then!!

This is my latest Flash extension panel – Ratio Calc. We’ve all been there, creating a video player for an application and having the task of working out the aspect ratio, or perhaps resizing images or even just trying to work out the size of the stage. This tool will do it for you with a few simple clicks and it’s free. The aspect ratio of a shape is the ratio of its longer dimension to its shorter dimension. It may be applied to two characteristic dimensions of a three-dimensional shape, such as the ratio of the longest and shortest axis, or for symmetrical objects that...

The Scenario You are creating a Flash project that feeds text in from an external XML file. The text is currently in English but there is a requirement that the text be changed to other languages. The Problem You have added foreign characters such as é, ü or ß and they don’t show up in Flash. The Solution Follow these steps below and all should be well: Ensure that your XML document is formatted as UTF-8. If you are using Coda, it’s simple enough. and that is also has the correct XML declaration in the header:  <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?> Ensure...

Here is my latest offering of notification alerts to Flash – a Facebook style pop up window that supports basic html formatting. It seems that the power of Facebook is everywhere (just take a look at flCodr [try clicking on the download link]- its using the Facebox javascript code to create modal dialoge boxes). I couldn’t resist creating my own version just for Flash. This one is a simple AS2.0 version that uses the tween and easing classes to add a bit of animation aswell. Take a look at it here and come back for some info about how it works. Setting it all up When you open up the...

Just a quick note about our sister site – flCodr. There is an update available for the extension panel. Find out more about it here: www.flcodr.com/download.php

My latest Flash based location app is called Find Me and is basically a mash up using Google Maps API, the GMap Flash component and a geo-ip script that tweets your location on Twitter. Take a look at it here. Please note that is in beta at the moment. You will also need a Twitter account set up which can be done here. To tweet your location simply enter your username and password and click on the green tick. When the app loads click on the little transmit icon at the bottom right. Your information is stored on a cookie on your local machine and is not saved anywhere on my server. If you like...

Not that I mean to show off or anything, but I was in Web Designer Mag again this month. This time they were featuring my Locator panel extension for the GMap component. The extension is a search engine for latitude and longitude co-ordinates that can be entered into the GMap component as points on a map. To read about it, take a look at the original post here. Take a read of Web Designer Mag for loads of Flash, Dreamweaver and Photoshop goodness, plus subscribe to my RSS feed to stay updated on my future Flash work.

After many hours of hard work by the team here at the SizzlaMedia offices (ok just me, in the study) the problem with the GMap powered apps has been fixed. Turns out a Google Analytics script was somehow appearing in the Flash apps. Once I removed the script everything seemed to work just fine! Hopefully we won’t see any more errors popping up!!