I love Tagul
I don’t like tag clouds. Not in the way they’re usually implemented anyway. They are dull and ugly, really nothing more than a list of words of varying sizes. And yet, properly designed, they can be great infographics – beautiful and informative at the same time.
I discovered Wordle a few weeks ago and I found it fun for doing a little literary analysis, or comparing the spin on the news from different news sites (say Fox vs. CNN.) Still, I was unhappy with its lack of flexibility and options – not to mention that’s not a real, interactive tag cloud. Then I heard about Tagul.
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Vulnerability Analysis for Flash Developers
Flash Developers get a new shiny and powerful tool for their toolbox: static analysis (and a free decompiler) from HP.
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AS3 Performance Optimization
Working on a CPU-intensive app in flash is a challenging experience. It can be wonderful or frustrating, depending on your mindset. Based on my experience with flashCHESS and other intensive applications, I’ll give some tips and ideas on how to get the most out of your flash project.
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Flash CS4 supports conditional compilation
With all the excitement about CS4 and the major features it brings (3D, the new timeline and so on), some less ‘shiny’ improvements tend to be overlooked. Such is the case with conditional compilation. Developers familiar with “real” compilers will instantly know its power.
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Actionscript, chess and the quest for performance
The reaction to flashCHESSIII has been overwhelmingly positive, especially on forums, even though the blog entry received just a reply. Advanced chess players were expecting a tougher engine though (some players have estimated an Elo rating of of 1500-1800 for the engine). The first time I compiled and run the engine, after weeks of just [...]
Full StoryChess in AS3 – beta 1 available for testing
After too many sleepless nights, I’m now confident enough to show it to the world: flashCHESS3, a complete chess engine written in AS3. Our old actionscript chess engine was written when AS1 was still in beta, and had many shortcomings, but was very popular nevertheless. The new game is written completely from scratch and uses [...]
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AS3 Tutorial: Creating a Slideshow
The code is AS3 and the tutorial assumes some general knowledge of flash and actionscript 1 and 2.
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Free Pie Chart Component
I needed to create a very simple Pie chart in Flash – one that had to work standalone (just a swf rendering data from an XML source) and it had to be very small.
Full StoryNew Flash Gallery – feedback please
I had this idea on the back of my mind for a while now; the idea of making a photo gallery that’s both efficient and good-looking, one that supports a large number of images sorted in categories, easy to navigate either randomly or in sequence. Finally, I have a working version and I’d really like [...]
Full StoryMoving an object on a path in AS2
Lately I’ve been working on a custom solution to animate movie clips via Actionscript. As I needed more flexibility than the Tween class provides, I’ve thought about writing my own engine and started studying Bezier curves. Fortunately I discovered Path.as, written by Ivan Dembicki. Basically you give it a number of control points and it [...]
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