Tilt a chat a blob dodo, Parallax a Penguin, Multi multi user touch, Spectral Flash with Dan Zen

Dan Zen comes out of hypernation with a collection of advanced interface Birds – Birds? – for Flash.

FLASH FEATHERS

ROBIN – multiuser chats and realtime games with Flash and PHP
FALCON – easy data transfer between Flash and server scripts
HUMMINGBIRD – parallax effect with mouse for 3D menus
GOOSE – multitouch emulator with just Flash and Browsers
PENGUIN – tilt emulator and processor for tilt and translation apps
WOODPECKER – sound frequency and wave animation for MP3
OSTRICH – motion capture cursor follows your Web cam motion
DODO – blob detection of motion in a Web cam

Thousands of lines of code has gone into the Flash Feathers series so that designers and developers can create the functionality of each in a half dozen lines of code.  So… let anyone you know who works in Adobe Flash about the Flash Feathers site at:

http://flashfeathers.wordpress.com

If you are interested in advanced interfaces but do not code then you may still want to watch the video section of each bird site as we go through the examples.  All the working examples are in the zips.

Dan Zen will be performing Hula songs in Hawaii for the next while and may have some time for a feature later in the summer.

Falcon – Adobe Flash 9 AS3 Data Class

Have you ever wondered how social network sites are built like facebook, YouTube, flickr, MySpace, etc. and sites like Ebay, Amazon, any forums, wikis, blogs, etc.? There is a front end that you see and a back end that sits on a server. To be able to share data and make elegant use of the Internet as a medium, we have to be able to pass data (in variable or XML or JSON, etc. format) from the front end to the back end and back again.

Falcon is an Adobe Flash custom class that lets you send and receive variables, text, XML or binary data. You can load XML or text from a file or send and receive variables or XML to and from a server script like PHP and then on to a database like MySQL. Falcon automatically makes a DataProvider if your variables are sequential so that it is easy to make a DataGrid (table in Flash).

The Flash scripting language, ActionScript 3.0 is now a complete Object Oriented Programming language that follows the ECMAScript standard as does JavaScript. In doing so, the language has become very internally consistent. For this consistency to work, the former classes (properties and functions) have been broken down into smaller or more precise classes. This means that to handle data, ActionScript 3 now has five classes that are used to load even just one variable! These are URLVariables, URLRequest, URLRequestMethod, URLLoader and URLLoaderDataFormat. This results in fifteen lines of code.

Falcon wraps or combines these native AS3 classes into one class. The class uses three active lines of code. This simplification makes it easier for designers and developers to provide important functionality of sharing information.

As an inventor of social games, tools and environments, I realize the importance of passing data to the server so that it can be shared. This technique is used in the following Darth Detector, Changing Mail, Chatnap, Baron Digbody’s Castle, Lady With Brooch, Danisms, Dens, Dan Zen Garden, Gorgolon, Grim Reaper’s Age Guesser, Gycopo, Hip Cats, Kula Pu Idol, Moustache Mysteries, Opartica, Pagoda Of Games, Password Paradox, Tapoll, Prediction Train, Rich Deck, Salamander, Save Earth, Spirogram, Spy-mail, Telepathy, Teleporters, Tilator, Tower Of Babel, Web Ouija, Utopia, Wannaget, Word Warp, Yesumno, Zen Deck, Zen Dots, Zen Mix, Zen Motto, Zen Pass, and Zen Picture Pan Zoom.

-08-