By Armand Niculescu on January 4, 2010
In case you think embedding fonts in web pages is something new, I made the first font embedding experiments in browsers in 1998. It was working – cross-browser too: Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape Navigator 4. See, EOT from Microsoft is quite old (introduced in 1996) and Netscape had their own format, called .pfr, based on the TrueDoc technology developed by Bitstream. So how comes that more than a decade later we still don’t have a fully working way of using custom fonts on the web?
Posted in CSS/Ajax, News | Tagged css, cufon, embedding, flash, fonts, typography
By Armand Niculescu on November 20, 2009
A truly humbling moment: Google has selected my flashCHESS III flash chess game to be included with their Chrome OS.
Here are some screenshots – apparently the guys at TechRadar like the game as well considering the number of screenshots of the chess app
Posted in Flash, News | Tagged chess, chrome, flash, google
By Armand Niculescu on October 6, 2009
Flash Professional CS5 will enable you to build applications for iPhone and iPod touch using ActionScript 3. These applications can be delivered to iPhone and iPod touch users through the Apple App Store.
Posted in Flash, News | Tagged adobe, apple, flash, iphone
By Armand Niculescu on March 24, 2009
Flash Developers get a new shiny and powerful tool for their toolbox: static analysis (and a free decompiler) from HP.
Posted in Flash, News, Reviews | Tagged actionscript, flash, free, static analysis, tool, vulnerabilities
By Armand Niculescu on November 27, 2008
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.
Posted in Flash | Tagged actionscript, chess, flash, performance, tutorial
By Armand Niculescu on September 26, 2008
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.
Posted in Flash | Tagged actionscript, flash
By Armand Niculescu on June 30, 2008
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 writing code, [...]
Posted in Flash | Tagged actionscript, chess, flash, performance
By Armand Niculescu on June 24, 2008
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 most [...]
Posted in Flash | Tagged actionscript, chess, flash
By Armand Niculescu on May 29, 2008
The sites
I first saw it mentioned on Slashdot earlier this year but I only experienced it a month ago. Legitimate websites, with “infected” javascript. For example, it’s the standard swfobject.js but with a long line of obfuscated code at the beginning, looking like this:
document.write(‘<script language=”javascript”>$=”%64b%3d%22%3c7`7%3c [lots of code deleted] %3b”;eval(unescape($));document.write($);</script>’);
What it does is to create [...]
Posted in News | Tagged botnet, flash, vulnerability
By Armand Niculescu on May 5, 2008
The code is AS3 and the tutorial assumes some general knowledge of flash and actionscript 1 and 2.
Posted in Flash | Tagged actionscript, code, download, flash, free, tutorial