Emak Mafu Labs Blog

Couldn’t believe my eyes today when i found this little nugget, as a mac only company, this is a huge help! now that rusty unmanned PC will have to work twice as hard for its place in the office!!

check it our: www.charlesproxy.com/

Hey,

Having just completed a project using vector vision, i cant wait to use it again! We have had a lot of positive feedback for the way it looks. I would recommend to anyone wanting to use fonts in 3D that this is the way forward.

I still cant get over the way mathieu-badimon over at five3d creates fonts to be rendered by the engine. You have to download a flash panel from his site which you pass in the font you want a 3d version of, and it creates a class with all the typographical meta data about each glyph needed to allow flash to draw with the standard ‘lineTo’ function each letter with the correct letter spacing: check out this class: HouschkaLight.as tis pretty amazing stuff!

Check out the photography agency site that we just did that I used this in trayler.co.uk

I’m doing a project at the moment which has a big word cloud as the landing page for which i used papervision. But as some of you might know - papervision doesn’t do vectors very well. I pretty sure i made the best of what papervsion offers - using smoothing on everything possible guided by the demo at zupko.info, but it still didn’t seem to pull off desired effect…. enter vectorvision - check out the demo below - i think it really captures the power of what it can achieve.

I haven’t looked into it much yet, but i’m pretty sure its exactly what i’m looking for as i breezed over the code.

check out the examples + code from the repository - you’ll need the greatWhite branch of papervision for it to get it to work

Someone kindly videoed a portion of the Abobe MAX conference in Chicago - where they were exhibiting a sneak peak of what is in the next generation player to come out. Some really cool features seem to be in there, and ones that makes sense to be too. They seem to be working on their own answer to PaperVision by adding a z axis, although - no where a near where PaperVsion is now - but definitely delivering for the high demand of 3D environments.

Another cool feature that they have created is the ability to float text over many text box’s, just as if you were in InDesign, a solution that will bring a new layout to flash text through out the world.

They talk about some other stuff too - check out the video:

I’m not sure if this is a bug due to word press, or if one of our team sneaked into the database and did something ugly becasue one day both (designspam) of our blogs started playing up giving this error:

INSERT INTO wp_postmeta (post_id,meta_key,meta_value) VALUES (’59′,’_utw_tags_0′,’a:0:{}’)

after a while scratching my head and looking for answers - i wasnt really coming up with much, all the other blogs were saying that the tables might be currupt or the word press want upgraded propery, but none of these were relevant, so i decided to get knee deep in the database myself.

After creating many test blogs and databases, and updating them with our blog content - i noticed that the error only happens when an entry with the ID of 0 exists in either the wp_posts table or the wp_postmeta table. getting rid of this entry seemed to stabilize the system when creating a new blog…. until you added another one, and it tries adding it as zero again. So the whole problem rests on the fact that as soon as an entry exists in the database with ID 0, then things start going a bit wrong.

I solved the problem by changing the ID structure to auto_incremement, and zero dosnt get a looking, but fear this is a hack that might come back to hurt me later on.

I posted this article for two reasons:
1. To help some poor soul like me speed their day up a bit
2. Maybe get some feedback if this method has been tried and tested before

either way, would love to hear something on this matter

I have just been searching on how to link a class to a movieClip created with ‘createEmptyMovieCLip’ - which at first, seems like there is no answer, but i stumble accross this little nugget which is perfect for OOP component development which you dont want to rely on any assets what so ever.

Hers a little snippet taken from swfoo.com
A more detailed explanation can be found at peterjoel.com

++++++++++++++++++++++++

Actor.as:

class Actor extends MovieClip {
static var id = (id=”__Packages.Actor”)+
(Object.registerClass(id,Actor)?”":”");

public function Actor() {
trace(”Action!”);
}
}

To test:

import Actor;
attachMovie(Actor.id, “_mc”, 1);

works like a charm!

ahhhhh, I’ve been trying to work out for the past few hours now, why when i try to ’simulate download’ does my SWF not work…. its a bloody Flash IDE bug - apparently Flash forgets to flush all static variables, so any singletons or persistent variables are kept in memory, in turn sending my SWF coo coo! A nice way of demonstrating what I’ve come across is here at 5etdemi’s blog

I thought i would post about this because i couldn’t find any help on my particular issue. The solution to the above problem is quite simple and thats just to control the instantiation and death of all static variables, which i got immediately sent back a step in my quest for a solution due to me already doing this… my problem lies in amfphp’s as# class files containing a static variable somewhere, and my whole SWF depending on the ‘onResult’ result of a call on the application init().

Still trying to hunt down these smelly static variables…. (boooo! the crap side of coding)

I hope someone might stumble across this to their delight

I hope this post makes it to the first page of Google, because I’m getting a bit tierd checking there for some inspiration, or a new tool to help with this problem that plagues our image as Flash Developers, ‘Cool site, but bad SEO’.

Its time to provide a solution…. Emak Mafu has taken it upon our sly selves to solve this worldwide problem once and for all - Mafugle! Its as powerful as its Celtic sounding name and bites as hard as the dog it could be named after!

Our Goal is to provide a simple extra process to the Roll-Out’ phase of a Flash site, by Mafugling it (in place anywhere on the web), all the nessesary Xhtml files will be created per section, including all the links and images the flash site benefits from, so even Google images will have a chance to spy your images and add them to the very popular images.google.com. These files will appear next to your .swf, and some cunning code will be put into your index file directing all the searchbots to the SEO files, instead of tying to figure out the contents of the .swf.

How this will work:
The only purpose of the .SWF is to provide a nice way of displaying the data in the database. Its like CSS for xHtml. So following the rules of W3c, splitting design and structure is already done for us. So all that is left is to point all the necessary parts of an html page, like the title, body, images etc to the correct database entry, and wola! Its that simple - then throw in a Flex application to house such a process which will make the whole process as un-techy as your Gran, then badabing! - oh, did i mention that all the SEo file will actually be dynamic, so change anything in the database, all of your SEO files will mimic this information, so its a kin of, apply once, and reep the rewards kind of application.

Check back in the next few week, an alpha should already be installed on a clients website, i’ll let you guys know how it goes, and maybe give an estimate for when you can get your hands on it

So the FOWA has been announced for October 3rd - 5th. And it’s only a fiver!!!
I really hope it’s not going to be a Rails Fest…and what’s the deal with the wordpress website?

We are all heading down to chinwag on July 5th, check it out here. It’s free, there’s food, drinks and geeks, what more could you ask for. If you fancy a chat, we’ll the ones eating sausages like meat was invented yesterday.