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!

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…

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…