SimpleViewer v1.2 is released. SimpleViewer is a free, customizable, flash image viewing application. New features include more customization options, flash detection and bug fixes.
Justin Ouellette of Chromogenic used SimpleViewer for his winning submission to online photography magazine 28mm. Check it out here.
PopCap‘s games seem to be some of the most popular on the web. They have almost taken over Shockwave.com, and they have 2 new games: Zuma and Rocket Mania.
When I first checked out PopCap’s games I was upset by the mindless gameplay which usually involves repetion of simple tasks. These games seems to be targeted at a large and unloved sector of the games audience: old people and office workers. These people have web access and lots of free time. They want undemanding, relaxing games with nice graphics that will kill some time.
After playing Rocket Mania for a while I began to succumb to the almost zen-like state of mindless clicking. The games are very well crafted and easy to use. They have good installers, effective sounds/animations and very tactile UIs. There is usually a random play element to keep up interest, and a game system where good (or lucky) plays are rewarded with chain-reactions of explosions.
As the game market expands to cater to people other than teenaged boys, I think PopCap will do very well.
If you like high-intensity shoot-em-ups then check out Mutant
Storm. It has the frantic gameplay of the old-school arcade game Robotron,
but it’s been updated to include a nice keyboard and mouse control system
and beautiful, trippy 3D graphics. Mutant Storm is created by a small independent
development team. Download the demo or buy it directly from their site for
$20.
The AOL
MovieGoer Awards Voting Interface is live. I developed the Flash front
end, which talks to a AOL backend for voting and tracking. Votes are stored
locally via a Shared Object. Over 7 million
votes were tallied last year, hopefully this year there will be even more.
One thing to be aware of when developing Flash projects for the
AOL browser: external
JPGs may not load. The AOL browser will convert the JPG format into the more compressed
ART file format for faster download speeds. The Flash player chokes when it
tries to load an ART file. The most reliable solution is
to convert all jpgs into swfs. Illustrator will do this for you as a batch
job.
Grant Skinner mentions the dreaded wrapping spaces bug. This is where dynamic textfields will wrap spaces on the end of a line to the
front of the next line, creating an uneven left margin. One solution
is to slightly increment the textfield’s width after setting the text. As a textfield prototype:
TextField.prototype.unwrapSpaces = function() { this._width = this._width + 0.01; }
Just ran into this bug when using Flash’s sendAndLoad with Safari. When using the “POST” method in the Safari browser, the final character will be truncated. To work around this, add a junk variable at the start of the send object:
submitData = new LoadVars(); //avoid safari bug submitData.junk = "zzz";
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