Welcome to our most hotly contested pumpkin showdown ever! This year, exciting new teams formed to reshape ordinary pumpkins into masterpieces. Please vote to help decide which pumpkin wins, and which get burned.
For something new this year, the app was crafted for HTML5 using CreateJS. We also continued something old, with the app being built by the newest member of the team, O’Jay.
I am proud to announce the winner of this year’s pumpkin contest!
“Kill All Pumpkins”, Ryan and Lanny’s homage to Futurama brings home the gold, narrowly edging out Grant and Wes’ “2001, a Squash Odyssey”, and “The Angry Pumpkin” by Sebastian and Chris, which kept up until the last few days of the race. There were some great entries this year, and I think it was one of the best contests yet.
Thanks to everyone that voted!
Maybe we are compensating for missing halloween last year, but 2011 is our greatest pumpkin contest yet! On Friday, fuelled by beer and pumpkin ale, we split into teams and commenced the hack-and-slash carve-fest.
Continue reading →
We have made some changes to the free Project Panel Update that we released last year, which makes it compatible with Flash CS5.
Unfortunately, CS5 now overwrites the project panel files each time it launches, so this new version installs as a completely separate panel, which was have renamed “gProject”, a nod to its humble roots.
For more information on what the upgrade brings to the Project panel bundled in Flash, please read the original post. Since it is free, we can’t promise any support, but feel free to report any bugs using our support form.
You can download the gProject panel for CS4 and CS5 by clicking here.
Another year is gone, and another gPumpkin contest has come to a close. Many a beer and chocolate was consumed, and overall it was a great break from our normal routine. Congratulations to Grant and Wes, whose pumpkin “The Horror of Corporate Conformity” took first place. Between Grant and Wes, one of them have been on the winning team each year. Conspiracy? Probably.
Highlights this year included:
Overall it was great fun. We leave you with a shot of all the pumpkins together. See you all next year!
I’m happy to announce that we just released version 1.2 of our client-side, check-as-you-type, spell checking library for ActionScript 3 projects in Flash, Flex, or AIR. This version includes some significant updates including:
SPL 1.2 is a free upgrade for current users. If you own a license to SPL, and have not received the update package, please contact us through the support form on our product site.
You can find more information on the Spelling Plus Library, and see demos of it in action at the SPL product page.
The CS3 component architecture makes use of TextFormats for all the text-styling needs. This decision was (likely) made to simplify the API, but still allow full control over the formatting of the text.
Natively, there is zero support for CSS styling, in fact, setting a styleSheet on the textField of a component (all components expose their textField instances) results in a run-time error, since TextFormats can not be set on textFields with a styleSheet.
But fear not! Not only are the components easy to extend, but it is not at all difficult to add CSS support to any component. In this example, I have added a styleSheet component style to a TextArea, which plays nicely with the built-in TextFormat. Rather than just posting the source code, I have broken down how the implementation works to provide some insight on how the components work, and how this sort of approach can be applied to any component, for almost any task.
Something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now is port our ColorMatrix class to AS3. It’s a fairly simple conversion, but is still a handy utility to have on hand.
If you haven’t used the ColorMatrix class before, here is the description from when we first released it in 2005:
ColorMatrix provides a way to adjust Brightness, Contrast, Saturation and Hue based on a range of numeric values as well as multiply matrices. The ColorMatrix can then be passed into ColorMatrixFilter to apply color adjustments. The added bonus of ColorMatrix is that it uses the same calculations to generate matrix values as the Flash 8 IDE (with the exception of contrast adjustment which uses linear interpolation to provide a bit more granularity).
Download the updated source here
Here is a quick sample of it in use. This demo is included in the download package.
