SEO, SEM, web design, coding, iPhone, iPad, Android 

This swf shows a marquee of letters scrolling across a 3D panel that rotates according to the mouse position. In this post I thought it would be helpful to walk you through how I got to the final swf by combining a few different pieces of code. The swf is a combination of a custom text rendering effect using BitmapData, the DistortImage class, and a simple 3D engine. (All these examples require Flash 8 or higher).

View swf | Download source.

Initially I was experimenting with text effects using the BitmapData object. Using BitmapData can give some interesting raster effects, that you can’t create just with movieclips. With BitmapData you typically want to work on a small canvas, since calculating per pixel effects across a large area can be very CPU intensive.

The idea is to repeatedly copy a blurry letter movieclip into the bitmap using BitmapData.draw() to give the fade in effect. The fade out effect comes from copying in a 5% alpha background color every frame. After playing around for a while I came up with this:

View swf | Download Source.

Once I was here I thought it would be nice to give this a perspective effect, like watching a marquee text scroll in Time Square. True perspective effects are the holy grail for Flash developers and have been hard to achieve until recently when the awesome DistortImage class was released by the creators of Sandy (based on orginal code by the genius Andre Michelle). This class will chop up any movieClip or bitmapData into multiple triangles, then skew the triangles to fit any 4 corner points. DistortImage causes image quality loss and rendering artifacts, so this technique is not useful if you want 100% image clarity. I took the bitmapData object and applied it to a DistortImage. I also modified the text effect so that the text now scrolls horizontally.

View swf | Download Source.

Once here it was a reasonable leap to have the panel move in a 3d space. For this I could have used Sandy or similar, but really i just need a very simple engine to give a 3d perspective render on the 4 panel corner points. From this list of 3D flash engines, I found Andre Michelle’s Simple 3d Engine. Modifying this to render a plane gives this:

View swf | Download Source.

Combining the 3d plane and the DistortImage gives the SWF at top. This required converting the 3D engine to an AS2 class.

Here’s the finalists for the Independent Games Festival. Most of these games have a free, downloadable version. Support your independent games developers and get downloading!

Making a note of this here because I don’t see it in any of the docs.

When using ExternalInterface cross-domain (i.e. the swf and JS are on different domains) you may get an ‘Unspecified error’ message in IE. Debugging in Visual Studio gives an ‘unknown exception’ in the return statement of this function:

function __flash__addCallback(instance, name) {
instance[name] = function () {
return eval(instance.CallFunction("” + __flash__argumentsToXML(arguments,0) + ““));
}
}

The fix is to add

System.security.allowDomain("*");

in your AS code. ExternalInterface requires the allowDomain to be set when HTML-SWF cross-scripting is performed even though it’s local to your browser. Thanks to my co-worker Sean Neville for this information.

(Note that you will also need to set allowScriptAccess="always" in the swf embed tags to allow cross-scripting)

We all know about “Black Friday“, the day after Thanksgiving when people get trampled to death at 3 am trying to purchase “tickle me elmo” for $5 cheaper than normal. I’m sure we all feel the affects in our wallets, but so do the businesses. It was coined “Black Friday” because that is when the businesses pull themselves out of the red and bring their business in the positive. Between camping out in the cold all night and developing a never known form of claustrophobia, I don’t think I can handle it anymore personally. More an more people seem to be opting out of “Black Friday” and getting involved in what is now coined as “Cyber Monday“.

The Monday after Thanksgiving was officially given the name “Cyber Monday” in 2005. Many businesses market online only deals and free shipping. It is not necessarily the biggest online shopping day of the year, but it usually starts it. The estimate that the busiest day over all is usually around the 12th of December. That is stretching making sure your packages get delivered before the big day.

With more and more people trusting the internet and purchasing things on the internet, why shouldn’t sales go up. Well they are. They are going up a lot. In 2005 PayPal recorded that they had processed $61 million on “Black Friday” and on “Cyber Monday” they ended up processing around $94 million. That was last year. I haven’t seen the numbers for PayPal this year quite yet, but they are not the only ones reporting these types of numbers.

A lot of people thing “Cyber Monday” doesn’t exist. These are the same people that think the world is flat. They must not be in touch with reality because it is here to stay.

Visa reported that from 2004 to 2005 sales were up 24%. Online sales between Thursday to Sunday pulled in around $925 million. They also said sales were up 26% on Monday to $505 million. In 2006 the increase ended up being very similar. Comscore reported that the from the first of November to the 27th of November, sales had gone up 24% and on “Cyber Monday” it had gone up 26%.

November 1 - 27

2005 - $7643 Million

2006 - $9484 Million

Increase of 24%

Cyber Monday

2005 - $484 Million

2006 - $608 Million

Increase of 26%

It was said that eBay, Amazon, and Walmart.com were the most shopped sites during “Cyber Monday“. So if you weren’t a part of “Cyber Monday” this year, remember to plan ahead and be prepared next year.

Bid management solutions claim to help advertisers cut costs and manage marketing budgets better. Is there a real need for bid management in PPC advertising?

Bid management solutions claim to help advertisers cut costs and manage marketing budgets better. Is there a real need for bid management in PPC advertising?

Why RSS Feeds are going to become even more important.

I've been a big believer in RSS feeds ever since I first heard about them. Now that IE 7 has been officially released and implemented some pretty nice RSS feed features , we should see RSS feeds become much more common place among "normal users" (as compared to geeky users that have already been using RSS).

Both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 have added even increasingly easier ways of subscribing to an RSS feed. Once you are viewing an RSS feed you are presented with the following options.

 

Now how hard is it for Joe Schmoe user to subcribe? Not at all. Merely click and you are automatically linked to consistently updated content from your favorite website.

These browser additions along with the plethora of feed aggregaters will surely increase the exposure of RSS feeds to normal mom & pop users.

Microsoft Update has started installing the newest Internet Explorer 7.

Well, over the weekend I was prompted to install Internet Explorer 7, so it looks like the mass update has begun.

I've been using Internet Explorer 7 since the second beta came out on my development machines to make sure that everything was going to migrate smoothly to the newest Microsoft product. The new installation went as easily as it could have.

We'll be posting new "year end browser statistics in a few weeks and it should be interesting to see who the early adopters are. (More than likely, it will be all of those people that have Windows set on "auto" update.)

I've already heard rumblings from the "CSS Webdesign" people that they are excited to "get rid of" IE 6 and only support 7. I'm not as confident. With the number of people that have slow connections, don't have windows update on, and/or have a pirated version of Windows, or just plain said no to the install, I think IE 6 is going to be around for at least another year before IE 7 really picks up speed. Only the stats will tell.

As for now, just enjoy the newest RSS feed integration and the smoother, less bulky feel of IE 7.