The Spike Ranch

So after some testing I found that Flash content goes missing when viewing in IE9 on Windows 7. There is a security bug that can’t be rectified from within Actionscript 3 so you have to trick the browser into a different setting.
If you control the content and have access to the HTML page you can do the following.
Paste the following meta tag in the head of the page that contains your swf and your Flash content will show in IE9.

The alternative is that you have your users jump through security settings within the browser. I’d rather have them not notice the flaw with this browser and continue to the content. This flaw could be fixed in the near future by Adobe or MS…whomever is at fault.

I just wanted to post this so it shows up in searches on the internet. Do not sell or deal with James Harriot who uses this email address: James Harriot jamesharr32@yahoo.com

I was selling a bike on a website and he contacted me through the site urging to me to talk via his email address, here is a sample email of his:
Hi,
Thank you for your reply and good to know the ad is in good condition and also love the pictures, I’m okay with the price it isn’t much though but how much can you go down on it ?? , Concerning The payment ,The problem is that we’re deaf and my wife will be responsible for making the payment .I may have regarding payment we will send you a check, the money as well as the transport and for me you are to provide the following information where the payment could be send to you .
Name …….
Address ……..
City ……….
State …………….
Postcode ……………….
Country ……………
Phone Number …………………………….
Last Price ……………..
I expect these details so that payment can be sent to you, and once you confirm the payment on your account, a sender will come and pick up the ad at your place, so you do not worry about shippment okay , I wish to come over and see it but i can’t due to the situation of my wife been pregnant and this is our first baby in life .I will be looking forward to hear back from you asap
Once again, thank you for your interest in selling to me …. I await your e-mail …
Regards.

—-
I did not sell him the bike but was warned by a concerned web admin. not to deal with him.

I had a client several months ago come to me wanting a form done that was different than the standard questionnaire. Having the desire to get into Papervision3D code at the time I thought that I could show each form question as if they were spread out on a flat surface but use the 3D camera view to fly to each question versus have each question slide in to view. Continue reading ’3D Questionnaire form’

After working in Papervision3D for 6+months I wanted to add another code snippet to show a basic panel flip using ColorMaterials instead of MovieClips on each Plane.
This was written using TextMate and the Flex SDK which compiles the swf to be 1024×768 with a white background. Continue reading ‘Basic panel flip’

Finally got to put some new Papervision3D samples up today. The following samples were built for my current employer. These samples will be shown to the customer during their self-service processing. The idea is that they’ve already uploaded their artwork in PDF form then are taken to the proofing stage. In the proofing stage they use the PDF as the master proof but we want to show them a 3D version to give them an idea of how their project will look. All of these samples were built using Papervision3D and AS3.
You can view all of the samples here.

I’ve seen some pretty cool 3D augmented reality in the past year so since I had some time I thought I’d adapt some code to display a 3D example that I recently created.
I used an basic example I found online, altered the code to my needs and used the explode image sample that I posted the other day. This example took half a day creating the pattern, that your web cam will pick up, and writing the rest of the code using FLARToolkit. This is the start of cooler things that I have planned for using augmented reality to support other website marketing efforts.
You can see the demo here.*
*There are instructions on the following page that include printing an image.

We’ve all seen the craziness that is Papervision3D, right? If you have never heard of such a thing then let me bring you up to speed. There is a surge in the Flash design/development community to build more engaging Flash experiences these days. Two popular Flash Actionscript code bases for developing 3D in Flash are Away3D and Papervision3D. I prefer to use Papervision3D at the moment and am really enjoying digging into the code to see what I can come up with. This process is usually the way I get into something interactive, I play with it, build stuff and then save the projects in hopes of applying what I learned to a future project.
I posted a couple of new experiments on my site recently that you can check out at the following links. I’ll probably wind up posting more samples in the WORK section of this site as I complete them so check back for that.
Demo: Image grid with mouse interaction.
Demo: Image interaction while exploding the image.*.
* This sample is a take on my original experiment: http://blog.thespikeranch.com/as3-bitmap-manipulation/

Feel a small sense of accomplishment this morning, my Flash extension was approved by Adobe. You can download the MXP here: http://tinyurl.com/y87lcdr
This panel includes various buttons to quickly setup a new Flash movie as an ad banner at the click of a button. Sizes are based on the www.iab.net standards list. More info on the iab can be found at http://www.iab.net. The banner is setup to accept clickTAG or clickTag code commonly used on ad servers. It was a cool project to learn some of the JSFL code. Hope it helps some people.

I finally took time to knock out the final details of my Flash IDE panel extension which allows you a jump off point to building IAB.net compliant banner ads. I started working on this while I was working at Comcast Interactive Media, we were building so many banners that I wanted to give myself a shortcut to getting started with the banner building process.
The panel gets installed in the Flash CS3 or CS4 IDE and offers a number of common and uncommon banner ad sizes. Continue reading ‘Flash Build Banner Ad panel is done.’