Do you want to create a Flex or AIR application with a menu, that looks and behave like the menus from applications or the operating system? Good, than you found just the right tutorial.

Recently I spend two days on creating a MenuBar in Actionscript/Flex (for an AIR application), that should look and behave just like an ordinary menu we know from simple applications. Two days! Flex offers with MenuBar a versatile and fancy menu with boosted graphical effects, complex skins, fade-ins or other extraordinary things, that distracts from the for the pureness of a simple menu. And it pulls resources as well. Strapping it down and uncluttering is a way to do so, if you want to do a extremly simple menu. But it will cost time and will mess up the code (but it is possible to do so, we will come to this also). There is a much more elegant way to do menus for AIR-applications: Native Menus.
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Did you ever had that problem as a webdesigner, that you wanted to do your customer a good job, but he or she insisted on silly things? Like a navigation in WordPress made of tables? Than we have something for you. Here we go…

Why should I use table-navigation? That’s bad Web 1.0 style!

Well, that’s right. Somehow it is. But there is a certain point, you can’t manage with li-tags and css alone. If you want to display your navigation in that way, that it has always – say – 100 percent of the container width, and the single navigation elements are distributed exactly over the width, with equal padding of each element, than tables are your friends.

Standart li-tag bahavior: li-elements are floating left, leaving a “whitespace” on the right side.

Table-hack with mytag-list-pages: all navigation elements fill up exactly the space of the navigation width – no matter how many elements you add.

If you call this a silly design, let’s call it this way. Some customers demand this design. This plugin will make your live much easier, if confronted with that situation.

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Note the plain colors. Music is plain as well.

“White Butterfly” is an excellent shooter, that (at least in my opinion) did not got the attention yet, that it would deserve. It’s an brilliant designed game, made by Linley Henzell.

The game is unbelievable hard, even the first level makes you struggle, unless you play punishment-hard shooters on a daily basis. Each element in the game is well balanced, making the game fun and addictive like hell. You can choose of five ships, each equipped with three different weapon systems. Even if you fail each time at stage one, trying out different ships and weapon systems is a pure pleasure. Linley invented funny things here. You will end up try and try out new strategies to beat the enemies with different cannons. Inside the game each weapon will get stronger and stronger, the more enemies you beat with it… So even inside the game, you can every time change your strategy and focus on a weapon of your choice. Beautiful.

It’s been a long time that I seen an indie-game, that was so well-balanced with all details, even the colors, the sounds, the music are a perfect fit, underlining the whole game-experience. I would go so far to say, that this game is somehow a secret masterpiece! Don’t let it go without trying.

White Butterfly: Gameplay Video

Linley Henzell also made lots of other really good games, utilizing the Allegro-library.

discovered via TIGSource

One of the biggest problems of getting into Actionscript with the new open source Framework “Flex” from Adobe is, to make instant use of Actionscript 3 to generate and modify things. Many people will convert from old Flash, Processing or whatever scripting facilities to Flex, because the Flash Player 9, that goes along with Actionscript is really enhanced. And Flex from Adobe offers an open source SDK, where you can develop cool applications straightaway for free.

Instant fun for beginners.

When you start to get this done, Adobe only will throw Flex-examples at you. Or examples and tutorials with Actionscript, that are far too advanced for the beginners “Hello World” level. I also searched forums: most people want to get done quickly and start out coding with Actionscript without all this things in mind, but don’t get support. That’s why I prepared three files, that let you start immediately with coding pleasure.

The first file is a template, that show two ways to get sprites, that were generated with Actionscript directly on the screen. It shows two techniques, that are not obvious, especially not for beginners. Don’t mind the details. Just start your projects and feel free to use my files to build upon.

The other file is more strapped down version of the above. It provides you just with an empty Flex canvas, a stub for the Actionscript and a timer to control and animate things that should appear on the screen. If you download and compile the file, not much happens. Just an empty canvas. But you can easily build scripted animations with it, also with Flex-elements, like text-boxes that jump around or buttons with bouncing width etc.

The third is at the Olympus of simplicity. I create some rotating objects on the screen, that are derived from a custom class I wrote, that extends the Sprite class.

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This is a patch to enables the sending of MIDI-controller data from the Korg Electribe ES-1 to maxMSP.

Some technical details:

The ES-1 only sends MIDI note values on the MIDI-out port. The controllers are only sent by so called NPRN-Data. Usual audio-applications can’t handle this kind of data hidden in the MIDI-stream. MaxMSP allows to handle every kind of incoming data, so I figured out to convert the controller values into the max format. The single sample-channels 1 till 7B changes the controller values of the knobs. All in all you can control over 68 controller values in addition to the ordinary MIDI note data with that patch! Using the patch is pure fun, because the Electribe ES-1 it is still one of the best hardware controller interfaces available.

To use it, simply copy the content of the .txt-file into the copy-buffer and select in maxMSP “open from clipboard”. Done, that’s all. Download here.

If you port this patch to pure data or vvvv, leave a comment and we will link to your place or host your patch at this place. Use this patch for a performance? (It doesn’t have to be necessarily a music performance…) Then please feedback and post a comment here.

What is Smoove?
Smoove is a free open-source pixel, tile and sprite-editor for the Sony PSP programmed in Lua.
You can read, write and edit .PNG-Files.

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This here is a very simple technique, that may be CPU-extensive, but very easy to code. If you ever wanted to do something like a “worm” or “fade” effect, than the most clean way to achieve this is by using array-techniques, that is a time-consuming and sometimes complicated task.

This here I tried something else, that makes the code very small, with a tiny little hack, that does a “worm/fade” effect, just by using the canvas. The thing is simple: you just draw a transparent rectangle in the color of the canvas over the scene, just right after every frame. Visually the “worm” takes place. See it in action!

This technique is not suitable for most situations. But for small sequences or just to quick-draw simple effects can benefit from this easy solution. Also feel free to expand and experiment with this technique. Apply it to everything and very interesting effects will be at hand.

The Fade Hack

Made in processing, but the hack can be applied to mostly everything.

• Choose a backgroundcolor b
• choose the matching color bt with added transparacy
• draw a transparent rect over the whole screen at every draw
• simply move your object

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