Studioblog (n): a blog by Studiobanks about design, marketing, internet, business, Charlotte and more.

ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook

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In order to help my migration to Flash 9, I went ahead and read the ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook by Joey Lott, Darron Schall and Keith Peters.

Overall, I would say that it was helpful and recommend it, but even though my copy was a first edition, it did seem like the book contained way too may typos (both grammatical and in the ActionScript itself). Typos aside, the chapters on the Display List and XML were both extremely concise and informative. If you’re unfamiliar with either, I’d recommend giving them a look.

Like the other books in O’Reilly’s Cookbook series, the ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook works as a quick reference to commonly encountered problems. Focusing on the end results, their problem/solution approach to education works well when you’re already somewhat familiar with their subject.

Google Indexes Flash

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Google has announced improvements to their Flash indexing!

Unfortunately, Googlebots do not execute all JavaScript they encounter, so, if your SWFs are loaded via JavaScript, you may want to switch to SWFObject 2’s static method in order to ensure visibility.

For now, only static textual content is crawled but, as a Flash Developer, it's exciting to have Flash applications becoming more legit in the eyes of search engines. For a more detailed Q&A, head over to Flash Charlotte.

Starbucks Coffee At Home

Will 7 Comments

Yesterday, Robbie and I had a pretty good discussion about the Starbucks Coffee At Home site, so I thought I'd share it here.

At a quick glance of the site you know that the design and execution were both top-notch, so there are a lot of little details you can appreciate. However, what impressed us the most was that when a section was erased from the chalkboard/screen a ghost image remained. We wanted to achieve a similar effect with the Bouvier Kelly site we launched earlier this year, but due to the limitation of ActionScript 2 and the fact that most of the sections displayed dynamic content, we were unable to do so.

Talking it through, we decided the effect was created in either two ways.

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Muzak Expressions

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This year for the 2008 GlobalShop (the world's largest annual retail design event) Muzak created a unique multi-faceted marketing campaign based on the concept of expressions.

The Muzak booth featured hundreds of photos of people expressing angst, desire, elation and pride on 14 high-definition plasma screens with custom music programs that evoked each emotion. Booth attendees became part of the experience by being professionally photographed expressing one or more of those four emotions, then seeing their own photos added to the visual display throughout the event.

Expanding the experience into the web, Studiobanks created a micro-site for Muzak Expressions, allowing users to casually browse through the hundreds of photos Muzak took over the course of their campaign.

We're ADDY Sponsors!

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For this year's ADDY® Awards Studiobanks created a web campaign playing off of their "Call For Entries" print material.

We were then presented with the opportunity to be one of the event's title sponsors. So on March 6th at the ADDY® Awards you can keep an eye out for our ad in the event program (shown above) and our logo animation playing during the awards ceremony. Both feature the character design of Bloo Empire's Keeley Carrigan.

Here's a little sneak peak of the logo animation we put together this week:

WriteMaps Sitemap Application

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This morning I stumbled upon a pretty useful online app: WriteMaps.

WriteMaps is a free web-based tool that allows you to create, edit and share sitemaps online. It looks and feels a lot like the genealogy site Geni—which makes a lot of sense since a sitemap is very similar to a family tree (pages having parents, grandparents, siblings, etc.).

All you have to do is sit down and play with it for a few minutes to see how useful of a product this is.

9-Slice Scaling in Flash

Will 2 Comments

One of the humbling things about working primarily in Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash is that I've been using these applications for years and I'm still stumbling across new features. My latest discovery is Flash 8's 9-slice scaling.

Down at the bottom of the advanced options of the Symbol Properties window is a checkbox labeled "Enable guides for 9-slice scaling." When enabled, a set of guides will be positioned in your symbol and when you scale an instant of this clip asymmetrically in your published SWF – it will maintain a crisp, clean appearance with undistorted corners and edges.

Papervision3D

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Up until this year actual 3D in Flash has been nonexistent. If you wanted to achieve some sort of faux 3D effect you’d more than likely have to rely on importing an image sequence or vector animation from some third party application – so needless to say, I was really excited to learn about Papervision3D.

Papervision3D is an open source realtime 3D engine for Flash. Basically, it allows you to texture map and render a low polygon object, which you can then affect with Actionscript and any of the other resources in your Flash movie.

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Deep Linking in Flash

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For sometime now I’ve been trying to find a more elegant solution to deep linking within a full screen flash site and I think I’ve found the answer with Asual’s SWFAddress.

Basically, the SWFAddress records a history of all of your swf’s “pages” and (through Javascript and Flash 8’s External Interface functionality) enables your browser’s back, forward and reload buttons to affect your swf – while at the same time allowing your swf to affect the browser’s url and page title. This allows the user to have a much more intuitive navigational experience with your flash site.

Just think: users will have the ability to bookmark sections of your flash site and link back into them whenever they want, or use the browser’s back and forwards buttons to navigate through your swf. This is quite a step up from Robert Penner’s back button fix.

WiiCade Remote API

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Ever since I was a kid I’ve always been fascinated with video games so I was pretty excited when I stumbled upon the WiiCade Remote API.

Basically the API allows you to track the features of the Nintendo Wii Remote when displayed in the Internet Channel web browser. This means that you can make a Flash game that can be controlled by up to four Wii Remote’s depth, rotation, screen position and buttons.