Mike Garcia’s Blog

A big thumbs up to Samsung and it’s new Summer Collection site. I’m freaking amazed!!! Talk about inspiring…

Check it out yourselves here - Samsung 2007 Summer Collection Site

Absolutely awesome.  I’m an avid gamer and a friend of mine sent me a link for this little trailer.  I’m impressed.  Time to start saving for my PS3.

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/22702.html

I’ve added a new page for my ContentLoader class.  I use this package myself and plan on updating it regularly.  I know that it is lacking in features at the moment but I’ll get them added.  Let me know what you think.

I found an error in the Actionscript for my ContentLoader class.  I’ve updated the file which you can get here.  I apologize to anyone that this may have affected.

EDIT (11/07/2007) : The AS3 Progress Bar (non-component) tutorial has been moved.  I recently finished the new layout on my site.  With my site finished, I moved the tutorials from my dev blog to the actual tutorials section on my site found at here.

Things are finally looking up!

I managed to figure out Adobe’s XML Menu.  I had to modify it to suit my needs and after a few days a work, it is finally working.  I’ll be posting an FLA file with the symbols but for now, here is the final class file…

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I’ve been working around the clock to finish transferring the AS2 files for Fedler Studio over to AS3.  In the process, I was able to eliminate more than a couple hundred lines of code (as well as add a few dozen more). 

While I was working on the new code for the ImageReel class, I came to the conclusion that a much more robust photo gallery option needed to be added to the site.  I’m now using the ImageReel simply as a “preview” of the studio’s work and randomly loading an image from the reel when the site is loaded.  This also insures to some degree that the site’s visitor get a feeling that the site is changing regularly eventhough it may go days or weeks without an update.

Back to my earlier conclusion…
As with any development project, I try to use them as an opprotunity to dive into new territory (thank God for such an understanding boss).  I decided it was high time for me to dive all in and learn the Bitmap and BitmapData classes.  These two classes provide the most powerful Bitmap manipulation I’ve ever seen.  As a result, I’m even more bogged down with working on the transfer than before.  If you know of any good Bitmap or BitmapData class tutorials, please let me know.

The old site also used a completely graphical base menu (which then loaded seperate sub-menus using a custom class I wrote in AS2).  This makes it almost impossible for me to make changes to any part of the site’s navigation which I’m finding are going to be necessary all year since the studio is now using the site as such an integral part of their business.  Hoorah!!!   I’m now moving to a more robust XML fly-out menu which will prevent users from losing site of the main navigation.  However, AS3’s XML class is completely new and although it takes less leg work to work with XML, it is proving to be quite a challenge.  The reason…?  There still aren’t many tutorials out there on many of the new features in Flash CS3 so it’s an uphill battle.  :(  Bummer!

The thing I hope to accomplish with the new site…?  A completely dynamic and scripted Flash CS3 site.  As of now, none of my graphical assets from the AS2 version of the site have made it into the AS3 version eventhough it looks as though they do.  I’m thoroughly pleased with this and can’t wait to see the finished result.

Been slightly busy getting the Fedler Studio site code ported over into AS3.

I’ve finished most of the core components in each of the different movies. The original site is 5 different small swfs and 3 custom classes. With AS3, I’ve been able to convert everything over to custom packages and classes.

The beauty of the AS3.0 language is its simplicity. Event handling is done so beautifully in the new language and E4X support is a major bonus as well.

Needless to say, the port has kept me very busy and I will be for the next few days. I’ll be posting a few tutorials after I’ve finished the AS3 to help other people so they don’t have the problems that I did. Not too many good tutorials on the changes in the language and how it affects something as simple as loading a group of swfs into a FLA shell.

This is a post I made on the sephiroth.it forums. I’ve posted it here as well. The original post is here - Packages and Classes

Packages
======
Packages are a group of class files which often times perform specific tasks within an application (for instance drawing functions or file handlers). They refer to a directory path on the local computer to the exact location of the class relative to the main document. Typically, the practice is for programmers to define custom packages using the reverse web address for the given project. For instance lets say my website address www.mysite.com and I have a package named drawings. My directory structure would look like this…

main.fla
/com
• /mysite
• • /drawings

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Finally got a little more time together.  My blog and my site are live.