The Candybox Blog

Click here to download the source files. Other than Youtube an easy, and significantly higher quality video service is Vimeo. It’s pretty much regarded as the professional version of Youtube because of the higher quality videos that you can upload and display without suffering horrendous compression. Vimeo Plus even allows you to embed HD videos… In unlimited amounts! Bang! Holy shit. The perk here is that, much like youtube, you can use their handsome API’s to get your videos into Flash. It’s an economical way of incorporating streaming video into your Flash site… Because installing cool shit like Red5 involves...

System requirements: *PHP (4.0.4 and up) *MySQL *Apache Server *Flash (If you found this via a google search… Source files for the Flash are at the end of the post…) Short Summary: Update: For a tutorial, and source code, on integrating Pandorabots with Flash, click here. This is a concise collection of all the information that’s out there (as far as my research leads me to believe – since I last checked), + some personal trial-error-experimeddling on installing Program’s to host your own ALICE bot. This also walks you through the basics for building your own Flash interface (for your...

typeof is handy but can be a little too flimsy at times. Basically all it really understands are only six possible values; boolean, function, number, object, string, and xml. If you want to run a conditional to check if you’ve got some common ethnic group, such as a movieclip, on your hands then it works charms… BUT if you want to use typeof to check for a Text Field, or maybe something more exciting, then it’ll fail. At least I know of no other way… So! Today’s super simple code blurb of the day is: for (var i:Number=0; i<clip.numChildren; i++)...

I’ve been itching to do one for a long time since I keep being asked to do countdown timers… Then there’s always that pesky deadline that keeps me from actually not cutting corners and doin’ it fo’ realz. So dundid I didit! A countdown timer set to server time via PHP! (…You know, it should work, but I didn’t test it through n’ through, just threw the servertime integration together this evening :S ). Source files up for grabs HERE! The deal is if you do a countdown in Flash, the Flash Date object is set to the user’s system...

Here’s a quick particle effect I threw together. Thought I’d put it up here… figuring it might help some hapless googler searching for a quick fix, since it’s a super simple class you can easily reuse or (quite possibly) extend… probably. Download source here. [swfobj src=”http://nathalielawhead.com/sourcefiles/Mouse_Particle_Effect/silly_little_particle.swf” height=”400″ width=”480″] Mouse over the above area to preview. The AS (Particle.as) package { import flash.utils.Timer; import flash.events.TimerEvent; import flash.geom.Point; import flash.display.MovieClip; public class Particle extends MovieClip { protected var position:Point; protected var vector:Point; private var gravity:int; private var friction:Number; private var maxIterationsAlive:Number; private var iterationsAlive:Number; protected var update_i:Timer; public function Particle(p:Point, v:Point, g:int,...

This is a follow up to my previous post “Loading Twitter Feeds Into Flash (Through PHP)” (Check it out for source code and other resources)… After successfully doing so, the next most obvious question of any Flash developer would be: “Wow, Flash is awesome! So, can I display images and media files in my Flash Twitter feed reader?” Well, son… The answer is both Yes and, um… No. You can display direct links to media such as: http://realylongurltoyoursite.com/directory/anotherdirectory/image.jpg BUT Twitter has a 140 character limit (that’s just the idea behind Twitter, if it where longer it would be Tumblr). So...

[swfobj src=”http://nathalielawhead.com/noodles/twitter.swf” height=”200″ width=”600″] -Supports ability to retweet, follow, and shows a profile pic. Download the sourcefiles here. There are many cool things you can do with twitter. See Smashing Magazine’s article “50 Twitter Tools and Tutorials For Designers and Developers” I like it. Rather inspiring. Twitter is cool. You know you can even grab the coordinates of where the twitter twat tweeted? I feel sinister seeing that. Consider making a “stalk your ex” app using Twitter and Google Maps where you can enter a user name and see your “ex’s” migration and travel habits. Hehe… Evilness. Importing Twitter feeds...

DOWNLOAD SOURCE FILE [swfobj src=”http://nathalielawhead.com/sourcefiles/Share_All_FlashToSocial/share.swf” height=”199″ width=”597″] Here’s a quick .fla based on quite a bit of digging I dun did, to figure out what buttons you can put into Flash to best enhance your sites social networking capabilities… Oh shit, ouch! Sorry. That last line sounded like I fell out of the marketing department. Of course this example uses: var pageURL:String = ExternalInterface.call(‘window.location.href.toString’); To get the URL (based on where the swf is). If you’re picky and you know that is a bit iffy then use .php to do that or hardcode your shit in there. Like a boss....