Flash | MadeByPi® Blog

Feb 28, 2011

FontSwffer 1.1

Posted by Mikea | Filed under Apps, Development, MadeByPi® Labs, Typography

You may remember, in August last year, I released FontSwffer - a tool to simplify the creation of font SWFs for Flash.

Several minor updates and bug-fixes have been released over the last few months, and now, I think, it's time for a 'dot' release. So, here comes FontSwffer 1.1

Along with some little improvements, bug-fixes, and tweaks, the main new features are:

Project files:
You can now save and load all your font setup in FontSwffer project files (.fsproj - an uncompressed XML file)
File drag-drop support:
Drag-drop support has been added to the application for font files (.ttf, .otf, .ttc), font SWFs (.swf), and FontSwffer project files (.fsproj)
Application invoke options:
FontSwffer can now be invoked directly via project files, or by dropping font SWFs and fonts files onto the application icon.

If you've installed an earlier version, the next time you run FontSwffer the update should be downloaded to your desktop and it will ask you if you want to install it right away.

Or, if you fancy it, you can grab the new builds directly:

Windows - FontSwffer_1.1010_win32.zip
OSX - FontSwffer_1.1010_osx.zip

Dec 22, 2010

Strobe Media Playback: Wrapped

Posted by Mikea | Filed under Development, Our work

Strobe Media Playback (SMP) has quickly become my Flash media player of choice.

Built by Adobe - using the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) - it's simple to use, yet powerful; and thanks to being open source, the project is available for all to download, modify, and re-build at will. Which, as it turns out, is rather handy.

For a recent project I needed to -quickly- implement a Flash video player that supported various streaming protocols, and would play nicely when loaded/controlled by some other Flash content. For me, SMP was the obvious choice.

The standard player supports being loaded by another SWF - passing any flashvars from the loading SWF on to the player - but for this project I needed more control over the configuration, positioning, size, and full-screen behaviour. With a few small changes to StrobeMediaPlayback.as, and a new wrapper class to make loading and configuring the player from Flash nice and simple, I had what I needed.

When modifying the player, my aim was to retain all the original functionality and behaviour when embedded into HTML - so the same player can be used everywhere, as you should see at above... However, *caveat alert* I can't guarantee that, so if you end up deploying this somewhere important be sure to test it works as expected beforehand.

Changes to the player were made in the StrobeMediaPlayback document class:

Added an option to stop the automatic initialize() call when the player is added to the stage - to allow initialising the player with custom sets of parameters, not necessarily from the loaderInfo parameters.
Added optional width/height parameters to the initialize function, where passing 0,0 causes the player to fit the full size of the stage.
Added a resize function that can be called any time after initialisation.

Get the wrapper code and tweaked StrobeMediaPlayback here. There's a little read-me in there to help you get started working with the wrapper and/or rebuilding the player, and the changes are documented in comments at the top of the StrobeMediaPlayback class.

The wrapper and player modifications are built on version 1.5 of StrobeMediaPlayback - you can view/download the various SMP distributions on sourceforge.

Oct 6, 2010

FOTB… day 3

Posted by admin | Filed under Cool stuff, Where we've been

It's a little late, but here's our round-up of day three at flash on the beach...
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Sep 29, 2010

FOTB… day 2

Posted by admin | Filed under Cool stuff, Where we've been

Jon Howard - Where in the world? Intercontinental ballistic flash

Slightly impaired by the Monday nights drinks, we made it to Jon's globe based presentation. He showed some great techniques for lat & long mapping and a genius way of using excel to calculate equations for camera movement.
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Sep 28, 2010

FOTB… day 1

Posted by Mikea | Filed under Cool stuff, Design, Development, Where we've been

Two of us have hit Brighton for this year's Flash on the Beach conference! We'll be doing a few short roundups of the talks we've seen over the three days. There's loads of great speakers, so I hope we've picked the right ones to see!
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Aug 25, 2010

FontSwffer

Posted by Mikea | Filed under Apps, Development, MadeByPi® Labs, Typography

Creating font-asset SWFs for Flash used to be a bit of a pain. But now, there's FontSwffer.

FontSwffer is an Air 2 native application for Windows and OSX that lets you configure, build, and preview your font SWFs all in one place. All you need to do is set-up the fonts you want to embed and press a button, that's pretty much it. If you just want the font embed ActionScript to use in your own work-flow, FontSwffer can create that for you too.

FontSwffer uses the Flex 4 SDK to compile your SWFs, just point it to the location of the SDK on your hard-drive and you're good to go.
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Aug 2, 2010

Apparat – A custom Matryoshka

Posted by Mikea | Filed under Development, Technology

A few weeks ago Joa Ebert (@joa) released an update to the Apparat Reducer, adding the option of LZMA compression to further reduce your SWF file-sizes.

It works by squeezing your original SWF with LZMA compression, and injecting that data as a ByteArray into a wrapper SWF - hence the Matryoshka moniker.

The Matryoshka handles decompressing the data with an AS3 implementation of LZMA decompression, and then loads the resulting SWF bytes with a standard Loader object.

This all works beautifully, and you can get pretty decent reductions in file-size, especially on larger SWFs.

After testing it, I took a look at the Apparat sources - in particular the LZMA decoder and Matryoshka wrapper - and noticed that because of the use of the Vector type, the code was only compatible with Flash Player 10 or greater.

With the need to create Flash Player 9 compatible content still the part of many a working day, I felt it was worth trying to build a custom version of Apparat with Flash Player 9 compatible Matryoshka and LZMA decompression...

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Apr 30, 2010

Blend modes with Pixel Bender – an update…

Posted by Mikea | Filed under Cool stuff, Development, MadeByPi® Labs

I posted this blend mode stuff a long time ago, but the interface was awful and it slipped most people by.

So, I've packaged all the code up into a handy SWC and made a better example application for you to play with.

Here's the test page, and here's the SWC. As well as clicking on the source images to load new ones, you can save your blended creations by clicking on the output window.

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