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...

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!!

The latest issue of Web Designer Mag recently landed on my door mat and I was pleasantly surprised to see some of my work included in the mag and on their promotional disc. I was contacted by the editor a month or two ago about flCodr – the online repository for actionscript snippets. The site allows you to add and view snippets of actionscript code, perfect for when you can’t remember how to parse XML. Web Designer Mag say that: flCodr.com is a repository of code that has been placed in a single centralised location for quick and easy access. The site works by providing a simple search...

A tag cloud (or weighted list in visual design) is a visual depiction of user-generated tags used typically to describe the content of web sites. Tags are usually single words and are typically listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. The tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a collection of items that are associated with a tag. A tag cloud is a set of related tags with corresponding weights. Typical tag clouds have between 30 and 150 tags. The weights are represented using...

Back in my University days having a Mac was not always fun in a Windows dominated campus. I always had to ensure that my disc’s were able to be read in a Windows machine, even though they were burned on a Mac. After looking over some of my files I decided to share with the world some of the code snippets I found along the way. This posts concerns creating cross plaform Flash CD-Roms, inparticular opening folders from projectors. Auto Run Due to a security vulnerability in OS X 8 (i think!) the auto run feature was disabled on a Mac, however there was an option to open the root folder by default...