Bezier Tween AS2 Class

Bezier tweens are great for creating organic type motion. Robert Penner created an AS1 bezier tween function in this FlashCoders post .

Here is that code ported to an AS2 class. The BezierTween class extends Macromedia’s Tween class and can be used in a similar way. Download the BezierTween class. Instructions for use are included in the code comments.

Below is a demo that uses the BezierTween class (click here for a larger version).

[FLASH]http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/bezier_tween/bezier_anim.swf,400,200[/FLASH]

Quality="best" is better

[EDIT: This post applies to Flash 8 only. Flash 9 has a different way of handling stage quality]

This is something that is not very well documented, so I thought I’d point it out here.

By default Flash will publish your movie at quality=”high”. Setting the quality setting to “best” is a good idea if you are doing any scaling or rotating of images. Leaving the quality as high can lead to artifacting and jaggies as seen in the tests below.

Set your movie’s quality settings in Publish Settings -> HTML -> Quality.

[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/quality_test/qual_h.swf” width=”200″ height=”200″ fversion=”8″ bgcolor=”#ffffff”/] [kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/quality_test/qual_b.swf” width=”200″ height=”200″ fversion=”8″ bgcolor=”#ffffff”/]

Google Sightseeing

Why bother seeing the world for real? Google Sightseeing is a great collection of bizarre locations as seen from space, including Devil’s Tower, some strange salt ponds and a guy who wrote ‘DAVE’ really, really big.

Google Mapped Housing Listings

This is a fantastically useful integration of Google maps and Craigslist housing listings. There are no API’s available for either service, so there must be a lot of screen scraping going on in the background. The whole thing is really well done – it’s great how you can view housing photos within the map view. I can see this being extended to cover lots of other data (eBay listings, personal ads?).

Flickr Related Tag Browser

More Flickr goodness. Flickr Related Tag Browser lets you surf Flickr’s ‘tag space’. Flickr tags are keywords used to classify images. Each tag has a associated list of ‘related’ tags, based on clustered usage analysis.

These user-created tagging systems (or folksonomies), are an interesting way to organize data for ‘free’. Wandering between Flickr’s related tags can be a fun way to come across new images.

Flickr Postcard Viewer

Here is a little application that lets you browse thru Flickr’s huge image database, by searching for tags (keywords).

It’s quite amazing how many images are in Flickr. Type in practically any word and you will get back a load of images. I can imagine Flickr becoming a global collaborative image database, like a visual wikipedia.

Many thanks to the Flickr team for putting together a really easy to use API.