New tutorial on parallax 3D effects

Posted by Amu Ku, Flash Designer/Devloper

I just uploaded a new tutorial that shows you how to create a subtle 3D effect on photographs. This effect is widely used in documentary film making. This is the first tutorial in a long time that contains no ActionScript. Most of the time is spent in Photoshop preparing the photographs for Flash. Then I show you how to do the parallax animation on the Flash CS4 timeline. This may be my favorite tutorial that I have done so far simply because it is such an easy way to add pizazz to an otherwise boring photo.

Flash 10 Experiments: The Warholizer (Loading and Processing Local Images)

Posted by Amu Ku, Flash Designer/Devloper

One of the new features in Flash Player 10 is the ability to read local files. We’ve been looking at this feature for some of our upcoming components, and built a small example that demonstrates how to load, display, and process local images.  This example, dubbed “The Warholizer”, allows you to open any image file on your machine, and without uploading it to the server, extract the image’s bitmap data, and run it through some color filters, achieving an effect not unlike the one in some of Andy Warhol’s work. Try it out by dropping in a photo of your own for those 15 minutes of fame (though make sure the image is not too large: Flash has an upper limit on the size of bitmaps):

Note: The proper version of Flash Player is not installed or JavaScript is not enabled. Unable to display SWF content.

The code for the example is below the fold.

Google learns to crawl Flash

Posted by Amu Ku, Flash Designer/Devloper

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets. There’s more info on the Webmaster Central blog about the Searchable SWF integration.

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