Simon Heys

New version, Mac native code this time. Thanks to Andy and Jay for suggestions: now you can choose your own colours and font. Not that there was anything wrong with my choices. Planning to add finer typographic control in future, but for now… enjoy playing with the leading.

Visit Word Clock’s permanent home

So I have reach a dead-end in Flash. I now have a Screensavr that works perfectly, honouring all image proportions. Looks great, but runs slowly in Flash as it can’t handle so many individual images as the bitmap processing isn’t sophisticated enough; had to make it so that each row is a series of MovieClips rather than one BitmapData object. Setting cacheAsBitmap was causing too much flickering; turning it off makes it run too slow.

Unless there’s a major brainwave, a Cocoa rewrite is on the cards. This could take some time…

Download for Mac

This is impressive work.

“An open-source Flex library for browser URL control via deep linking which I have developed in collaboration with Todd Rein of Adobe.”

I’ve recently written something similar for Flash 8 (we’re yet to have clients that are ready for Flash 9 / Flex). I discovered this afterwards: it produces automatically generated human-readable URLs and caters for multiple state views; the same goals I was aiming for.

This is, uh, slightly better written than my version though…grr.

I just packed up the new version of Screensavr which I hacked together yesterday. Now automatically fills the screen, does different image proportions and can also read Groups.

Next stage is to get it to honour all image proportions and handle different sized images. Then it shall be complete.

So while I build up the energy to sort out the flickr Screensavr, I thought I’d upload the screen saver version of Word Clock. Nothing to configure here - just download and install.

Download Word Clock installer for Mac

So here it is. More fiddly than I was anticipating. You must first enter your flickr user-name into the control panel.

Download Mac installer 0.0.2alpha

No Windows version, I don’t have the power. Or the inclination.

Image courtesy of jaypeg.

Hah! See what I did there? It’s a flickr-based screensaver. This is some old slideshow code I had lying around, a nice way to view a stream of images as they scroll by. In these new days of the internet it seemed appropriate for it to read a flickr photostream. It will be available on this site when I figure out a nice way to allow people to configr it.

The site using the magnetic code is now live…at last!

The magnetic code sits at the core of a structurally complex site which was built by the rest of the Tonic Flash crew. They implemented full browser history, bookmarking and deep-linking which is a joy to use.

www.thejunglegroup.com

At tonic I was recently working on a project for a client where we wanted to get across the idea of different teams working on individual projects. I came up with the idea of magnetic navigation, which attracts a different group of people appropriate to the selected project.

There were a few ways of achieving this; the best one turned out to be using the elastic collision code, but adding attractive forces. There is a fair amount of mathematical calculation going on per frame. Flash 9 Alpha came out at around the same time, so out of curiosity I rewrote the initial ’sketch’ concept in AS3. Yields a massive speed increase!

Requires Adobe Flash 9 plug-in.

The site itself is Flash 8 and will be live early 2007.

Vector field proof of concept in Flash 8. Uses displacement map as a ‘cheap’ vector field - providing you’re not expecting miracles it works quite well. The colours mix together naturally which is a nice side effect of the filter.