PostcardViewer has been updated. PostcardViewer is a free, customizable Flash image viewer. The interface is based on the real world metaphor of a set of postcards shuffled onto a surface.
I’ve also posted a Picasa web template to make creating your PostcardViewer galleries really easy. Just select your images in Picasa and click “Export as Web Page…”. Thanks to Albert W Alberts for the template.
One other update worth mentioning: the SimpleViewer Picasa web template has also been updated.
It feels very good to finally get this one off my chest! I’ve been meaning to build a nice Flash interface for image search for a long time now. I tried it in Flash 7, but it turns out that most of the images on the web are progressive-JPGs. Since Flash 8 can handle progressive JPGs, if figured I had to git ‘er done. Check out the app here.
The search results are courtesy of Yahoo’s fantastic Image Search API. Originally I had tried to connect to Google’s image search by using screen-scraping, but it turned out to be much easier to hook up to the Yahoo API, which returns nicely formatted XML.
The interface is designed to be a simple as possible, while retaining some powerful features. Hopefully this is something that is genuinely useful and will “empower image searchers across the world” (cue dramatic music). Check out a more in-depth description of Simple Image Search here. Please let me know if you have comments, suggestions or bugs.
This is an old swf I dug up recently when I should of been learning AS3. I like the way it turned out. The pseudo-3d effect is achieved by using a variation on the old drag the nose by the cursor effect. Here is a bigger version.
Oh yeah, the floating head belongs to Gene Liebel, my old work mate at Huge.
You would need to knock holes in your cubicle walls to fit this monstrosity. I mean seriously, how many pixels do you need?
Not to be outdone, my work mate pointed me to this ridiculous monitor. Those desktop icons must be about 6 inches across.
If you create a movie containing an embedded font and publish in Flash 7 then Flash 8, you’ll notice that the Flash 8 swf is a few K larger. For Times New Roman, Basic Latin characters, Flash 7 is 13k versus Flash 8 at 17k.
I guess this is the tradeoff for the improved font rendering in Flash 8. So, if you are trying to squeeze every last K out of a swf, you might want to publish as Flash 7.
If you are developing Flash sites that talk to a backend system via XML or flash remoting, you need a web debug proxy.
A web debug proxy sits between your machine and the internet, and displays any HTTP traffic that passes between the two. This is invaluable for debugging Flash RIAs and data driven sites, by showing you exactly what data is being loaded into the browser. Some web proxies also offer bandwidth throttling which simulates a slow internet connection, and is useful for testing flash preloaders. There are currently 3 web debug proxies that are commonly used:
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