I just posted an update to TiltViewer. The main difference is that there is now a free version you can download and use on your own website.
The list of updates is listed here. Many of these updates are based on the great feedback that is posted in the TiltViewer-Pro forum.
TiltViewer-Pro customers are notified via email when there is an update. All 1.x updates are provided free of charge.
Just figured this out after Google came up short. You can disable an AIR application’s system chrome maximize and minimize buttons by editing the ‘MyApp-app.xml’ file. Uncomment and set your values in the following options:
<minimizable>true</minimizable>
<maximizable>false</maximizable>
<resizable>false</resizable>
There are also a bunch of other options you can configure in here.
I have to say that so far I am loving AIR. Building, debugging and deploying to AIR with FB3 is seamless and fast. You want file system access? Easy. You want encrypted local data? Easy. You want byte-level control over network traffic? Easy. Recently Adobe is really taking it’s dev tools to the next level, especially when you compare against what was available just a few years ago.
svManager provides a user interface for managing SimpleViewer galleries via a PHP application that runs on your webserver. svManager can be used with the free version of SimpleViewer or with SimpleViewer-Pro. Find out more about svManager here.
Thanks to Jack Hardie for doing a stellar job putting svManager together.
One of the most popular AS3 tween engines in Zeh Fernando’s Tweener. Another tween engine I just found out about is Jack Doyle’s TweenLite. Both are great lightweight engines that provide a convenient syntax for handling tweens.
There is also Flash’s built in syntax for handling tweens. Until today I thought that calling an AS3 tween in Flash required the Flex framework, but it turns out that in addition to Flex’s mx.effects.Tween there is also a Tween class built into the Flash Player: fl.transitions.Tween. This works exactly like Flash’s AS2 tween class.
So, which is the best one to use? Tweener and TweenLite both offer an easier way to handle multiple tweens, delayed tweens, color tweens and more. TweenLite is smaller at 2k, over Tweener’s 10k. I haven’t dug into all the details of both, but for most cases, TweenLite does everything you need.
One other thing I love about TweenLite is that by default it will overwrite previous tweens to the same object. This means if you apply many tweens to the same object (for example a button color tween on rollover/rollout), you won’t start piling up tween objects in memory. In practice, the memory usage for a tween object is very small, but its nice to know that over a long period of time youre SWF won’t be leaking memory.
Eliot Shephard is one of the best photographers out there. His groundbreaking photoblog Slower.net is a collection of all the crazy stuff he sees in New York and elsewhere.
Eliot was kind enough to share with me (and you) one of his Photoshop actions for processing digital photos. This action walks you through the most important steps for processing your images, allowing you to tweak the settings as you go. None of this stuff will be news to Photoshop experts, but newbies (like me) should find it very helpful.
To install the action: Download this file to your desktop. Open Photoshop. Drag the file into Photoshop’s action palette.
To use the action: Open an image in Photoshop. Select the ‘Slower Photo Tweak’ action in the action palette. Click the little arrow at bottom of the palette to start the action.
Notice the checkmarks and dotted boxes to the left of each step. An unchecked step will be skipped. The dotted box represents a dialog box. If the box is there it means Photoshop will ask you to tweak the settings for that step. The default settings here mostly have no effect, the idea is that you eyeball the settings for each step.
The steps are as follows:
When you first start processing your photos, the temptation is to overdo the effects, making everything look like a still from the movie “300“. Once you become familiar with the options available and can recognize the effects in other images, you will find that the key is adding just enough of a tweak to bring out the image’s natural qualities.
Thanks to Eliot for providing this, and if anyone has suggestions to improve the action, let me know in the comments.
I am very happy to announce that my latest project has gone live: Design-Feed.
Design-Feed is a design feed aggregator. We hand-pick the most interesting design related RSS feeds and present them in an easy-to-browse format. This means you can get all the latest design news in one place, rather than trawling through hundreds of sites a day. Every post aggregated is also searchable by keyword.
Basically, it’s a one-stop shop to get all the latest web-design buzz. If you are familiar with MXNA, you can think of this as MXNA for designers. Take a look, and if you like it, make sure you send the link on to your designer buddies! Read more about design-feed here.
A big thanks to Stan Wiechers for building out the fantastic admin app that keeps the site ticking, and Thiago deMello Bueno for the graphic design.
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