I am not naive enough to believe I originally created this effect. As with anything, there always seems to be someone somewhere that did it sometime before :). Either way, I made a version of it for my previous site in AS2 and it came with me when I updated the site.

Ever since that first site there’s been a somewhat steady flow of questions regarding it. I vaguely remember writing a AS2 tutorial for it on gotoandlearn and I get a lot of mails regarding it.

So, I figured I’d take advantage of AS3’s massive improvements and create a transition class with the same effect. It’s hard to give it a specific name, but I’ve always called it the “pixelating transition“. You’ll understand when you check it out. Go ahead tough guy. Click the header!

Just got word from Jack / Greensock (Creator of TweenMax/TweenLite) that his most recent creation, TransformManager, is out on the market. Unlike the tween packages, it’s not open source, but has a small price tag on it. Personally, I would encourage everyone to either buy this, or support Jack via his Club Greensock. TweenMax/Lite is an amazing accomplishment from just one person and accomplishments should always be rewarded

Here’s a snip from the release statement;

TransformManager makes it easy to add interactive scaling/rotating/moving of DisplayObjects to your Flash application. It uses an intuitive interface that’s similar to most modern drawing applications. When the user clicks on a managed DisplayObject, a selection box will be drawn around it along with 8 handles for scaling/rotating. When the mouse is placed just outside of any of the scaling handles, the cursor will change to indicate that they’re in rotation mode. Just like most other applications, the user can hold down the SHIFT key to select multiple items, to constrain scaling proportions, or to limit the rotation to 45 degree increments.

As mentioned; this class, unlike the other ones Jack released, does come at a small price. I know people go to great great GREAT lengths to not have to pay for their music, software, classes et cetera but at some point you should step back and consider the implications it has on the evolution of web products. I’ve personally always been a ‘pay for your shit’ vigilante and I strongly encourage everyone to pay for anything you’re using on a regular basis.

That preach being done, if you use TweenMax/Lite, do check out the transform manager and it’s cool features! TransformManager

Quick and short post. Due to a suggestion from Ryan Ragona I checked out how much resources the circle loader took up and it was pretty unacceptable. I re-wrote the class so that it snapshots the vectors to a bitmap object and rotates that instead of the vectors (vectors are now never even added to the display list)

CPU usage on my dual 3.2 went from 11% to 1%. Quite a difference. I would strongly encourage you to re-download it if you plan to use it. (I also updated the original link)

Download V2 (300Kb) (3903 downloads)

That’s quite a topic. “A customizable gradient circle loader / animation for AS3“. I wrote it then looked at it and couldn’t help giggling. Aaaanyway. You know the one, we’ve all seen it. From the worst sites to the best sites, every now and then you see that circle that spins with an internal gradient. Like a snake trying to eat its own tail.

Most commonly these are bitmaps. Pngs exported from PS that are rotated. The problem with that is that it becomes pretty rigid. If you need to change the width or height or whatnot, you’re quickly faced with re-exporting a new one. Actually more or less the same thing goes for those that took the time to make it with Illustrator. Once you are faced with increasing the inner radius and not the outer, or vice versa - you gotta redo it.

Soooooo, without further adieu, here’s a scripted version that uses the drawing API to construct a circle that is fairly customizable. You can use it as a loading animation or just .. just a spinning circle because how cool aren’t spinning circles? Much much cooler than fireflies, for sure!

Well.. everyone loves transitions right? I do anyway. Even if they are utterly useless like the firefly one I posted a few days ago I still enjoy it just for the sake of the ‘ooooo‘ effect it can produce. I’ve always been a bit of a sucker for the pure visual parts of flash, which is probably why I went in the direction of ActionScript instead of C# or something else.

This class will take any content you give to it (A displayobject is required though) and distort it with the help of Perlin Noise, DisplacementMapFilter and a Blurfilter. The end result is something that looks like its ‘rippling out‘. (lack of better words! haha)

It dispatches an event when the content is completely gone, and you can choose what to do before starting the ‘road back’ so to speak. The last event it dispatches triggers a reset of the parameters so you can do it all over again! Click the ducky to try it! Download the class inside…

Admittedly, this is nothing fancy like crazy fireflies! Just a small auxiliary class I wrote just now because I needed it in a project. I call it Shuffler. :)

What it basically does is to generate either a random position in the array, or return the value at that position, but keeps it unique (ie: no value will appear twice). It’s super lightweight and has close to no commenting whatsoever! haha!

Inside you can find a quick experiment + source to a AS3 class that breaks up vectors/bitmaps into particles and then moves them around in a semi-random firefly pattern. It’s a little bit CPU intense so I added a fps meter (fpsbox, courtesy of Schell Scivally). On lesser computers I’m sure it can choke a little bit due to the 2000-ish bitmap particles swarming around with filters but all it all it should be fairly okay.

I guess it’s fairly useless, usability wise, but it looks friggin cool and it can handle any shape or size. The larger, the slower however….

One of the most irritating aspects of the web is that you so often find (almost) exactly what you’re looking for, but seldom just exactly. There’s bits and pieces out there and it can be terribly frustrating to combine information from multiple sources since they don’t always merge well or are compatible. Enough talk. Here’s the free stuff! : mysqlTuner!

I’ve written and compiled a script that will automatically keep your MySQL database in tip-top condition, and tried my best to keep the installation process to a bare minimum…

Don’t send unencrypted data from Flash to PHP. I’ve prepared a class that will take a string and convert it to HEX SHA1. It’s fully compatible to compare with PHP sha1(), puts less than 1Kb filesize penalty to your project and is able to iterate through at least 50 calculations a second…

Following up my previous post regarding server performance, I wanted to try and communicate my experiences with tuning specific applications that might run alongside (and under) Apache. MySQL has become amazingly popular during the last couple of years and its popularity is not undeserved. It performs well already out of the box and the fifth version is incredibly stable.

There are (of course! :D) a number of things you can do to improve your mySQL performance however, and here they are, in all their glory! :p

MySQL tuning: