Author / Lanny McNie

Lanny McNie

As the dev mgr, Lanny oversees the technical day-to-day details of production and makes sure things get out the door.

@astrostyle

by Lanny McNie

Better Typography for Any Web Project

Using the SCSS Baseline Type Utility

Typographers and type enthusiasts will attest that aligning a typeface to its baseline grid is an essential part of any text-heavy design. Maintaining a consistent vertical rhythm is an important part in the creation of beautiful typography and layouts. This is accomplished easily in programs such as Adobe InDesign. However until now, I have yet to find a tool that easily accomplishes this with web type, while remaining flexible to the individual needs of a project.

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by Lanny McNie

Technitone.com is back!

Create Music with Technitone (again!)

In 2011, we worked with Google on a Chrome experiment to demo the then-new Web Audio API. Although we were only tasked with coming up with something that could show the new audio features, our (often-excitable) team came up with a project that pushed our capabilities in a ton of technologies, including WebGL, Canvas, web sockets for multi-player, and CSS animations. For a great technical dive into the original Technitone.com we launched with, check out the html5rocks.com article!

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by Lanny McNie

Introduction to the Flash CC HTML5 Canvas Document

With Adobe Flash Professional CC® you are able to publish HTML5 Canvas documents directly. Initially this was done using the Toolkit for CreateJS extension, however it has now been completely integrated into Flash, configurable from the Publish settings. Those who are familiar with publishing content with the Flash IDE will find themselves able to create HTML5-ready content using traditional Flash Pro timelines and tools. Even with little to no HTML/JavaScript experience, you can publish interesting and dynamic content within seconds.
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by Lanny McNie

Bardbarian on Steam – coming soon

Thanks to everyone that has played and supported Bardbarian so far! It has been amazing to see what the Treefortress guys have come up with, and we couldn’t be more thrilled with the result.

An update has been posted on the Steam Community about what players can expect from Bardbarian once it arrives. Check it out, and be sure to leave your thoughts.

Bardbarian

If you haven’t checked out Bardbarian on iOS, yet – you can download it in the app store. Keep an eye here, or on the Treefortress blog for more Bard-related announcements in the coming months.

by Lanny McNie

Spelling Plus Library Open Sourced

We would like to let everyone know that Spelling Plus Library (aka SPL), our Flash/Flex spell-checking library has been released open source.

We first released SPL as a commercial component over 6 years ago, with a major overhaul to support the Text Layout Framework almost 4 years later. It was always our goal to provide a high quality, performant, and feature rich product, backed by great support. As the requirements of the industry have shifted, and the demand for Flash components has dropped, we felt it was a great time to release it to the community at large.

The entire SPL repository is now available under an MIT license, meaning it is free to use for everyone, including on commercial projects. This includes:

  • The SPL source code. Word list loader and parser, text highlighter, and spelling suggestion and replacement utilities
  • The Flex-based AIR application that helps create, modify, and export word lists
  • All examples, spikes we used for testing, and some internal demos
  • The build process to export Flash and Flex SWCs
  • Generated word lists using custom compression for US and UK English, along with tested word lists for Spanish, French, and German.

 
You can check out the GitHub repository to get everything. Feel free to submit pull requests. Please note that we are no longer supporting SPL, so any questions or issues reported may not get immediate responses.

Thanks to our supporters over the years, we are super proud of what SPL has accomplished, and hope that it will continue to see life moving forward.

by Lanny McNie

New versions of CreateJS released!

Wow. What a difference of couple of years makes. Most of you have noticed a shift in the industry over the last two years towards HTML5 — instead of running away from this change, we’ve embraced it. Our response was CreateJS: a collection of Javascript libraries that allow us to create the same high quality experience and quick turnaround that we are known for.

Not only has the framework been a major part of our development, but some great tools have been created to improve user workflow, such as ToolKit for CreateJS and Zoë.

We are happy to announce new versions of the CreateJS Libraries, available now on the CreateJS CDN and GitHub.

This update includes a new common event model, vastly improved documentation, and a ton of new features and fixes for each library. For specific information on the changes, please review the VERSIONS.txt file in the relative GitHub repositories.

We have also introduced a minified CreateJS library to the CDN, containing all the latest libraries in one handy file.

With this release, we are happy to announce the launch of the CreateJS blog, which will provide a centralized location for announcements and articles about the libraries. Read more about the update to the CreateJS libraries here.

Thank you all for testing, feedback, contributions, and bug reports…keep them coming!

by Lanny McNie

Orcastra: Live Web Audio using CreateJS

We recently spent some time playing with a new feature in Chrome called Web Audio Input, which provides access to a microphone or other audio input.

The result was “Orcastra” (ha!) which allows users to select one of five deep sea characters who lip sync along to the user’s audio input.

Orcastra

Creating Orcastra was quite straightforward. The characters were all created in the Flash CS6 IDE (MovieClips with timeline animations) and exported to HTML5 using Toolkit for CreateJS. We used PreloadJS to load all our assets, TweenJS for simple tweens, and EaselJS as the display layer.

We use feature detection to ensure the browser supports audio input, prompt users to allow access to their microphone, then listen for volume changes (with maximum mic gain) to confirm audio input before showing the character selection screen. Once the user picks a character, it’s just a simple matter of syncing the CreateJS animations with the current input volume level.

Orcastra should work with any Web Audio Input enabled browser. This currently includes the latest version of Chrome for OSX, and Chrome Canary for Windows, but you’ll need to enable the feature with chrome://flags and restart your browser before trying it.

by Lanny McNie

The Great Pumpkin Showdown 2012 Results

We recently continued our proud halloween tradition with Pumpkin Showdown 2012. We all had a great time and hope everyone else did too. And now, without further ado, the results:

Zom-B-MO Victory PictureThis year’s winner and predominant pumpkin is Zom-B-MO! It was a close contest with runner up Suzy Delores for a while, sparking some good natured office trash talk, but in the end the public picked which pumpkin they preferred.

Level 2: Grenade mod Defeat PictureOn the other end of the spectrum, there was a hotly contested battle for last place, with Level 2: Grenade mod clinching the title after a surprising rally with Mac-o-Lantern that catapulted it out of contention!

Congratulations to all of our contestants, and thanks to everyone who voted for their favorite.