Mike t. Henderson

Using String.search() in AS3: Determining Window Target in navigateToURL.

I came across an instance the other day where I had a set of links; some of which where internal, while others where external. I wanted the internal links to open in the same window(target="self"), and the external links to open in a new window/tab(target="blank"). Since I was loading these links from an external json [...]

Optimizing Flash for Search Engines

Last summer when Google announced that they were now indexing SWF files, they spawned many questions among the Flash community. "What exactly is being crawled?", "Do we need to do anything different?", "Which Flash Player versions?". At the same time, Google too, was a little unsure to what extent this content would be crawled. "We've developed [...]

AS3 Grid Overlay Utility Class

The Grid overlay class is just that. It's a utility class that draws a grid overlay (or underlay, or even middle-lay--however you want) within your swf during run-time, of specified numbered columns and gutter width. I created this class as a way to assist in maintaining the grid [...]

Perlin Particles within a Circular Boundary in AS3

The above example is another take on moving particles with perlinNoise. This time I'm containing the particles within a circular boundary by using the logic from my previous post, Mirrored Circular Motion in AS3, to regenerate particles on the opposite side of the circle. This experiment, as well as the rest of my perlin particle [...]

Mirrored Circular Motion in AS3

This experiment illustrates the angles of circular movement in Flash, while mirroring those angles on the opposite side of the circle. I have two mirrored movements here. The first movement being a Sprite that mirrors the mouse’s position on the opposite side of the circle, while snapping to the boundaries of that circle. Then a [...]

Maintain Pixel Aspect Ratio using NetStream in AS3

While recently working with the NetStream class, I was surprised to learn that there was no preset method in place for maintaining the pixel aspect ratio. The situation I faced was that I was building a video player that needed to host both 4:3 and 16:9 ratios. However if the Video object's dimensions are preset [...]

Pointillism in AS3 with BitmapData

The BitmapData.getPixel method is a pretty interesting method. In previous posts I've experimented, using the number it returns, to scale, rotate, move, and in my last post, create a halftone pattern. The getPixel method is defined by Adobe as: Returns an integer that represents an RGB pixel value from a [...]

Halftone Pattern in AS3 with BitmapData

Expanding on my previous experiment, using the BitmapData.getPixel and

Return Query Value — Version 2

A while back I created a little ActionScript 3 class, using the ExternalInterface.call method, that returns a query string value from the url. This came in pretty handy for things such as direct linking to certain videos within a video player, displaying campaign specific content on load based on different referring sites, ect, etc. Upon [...]

Moving Particles with Perlin Noise

In my previous experiments using Perlin Noise to create random movement, I played around with adjusting the rotation and the scale of each particle by taking the current pixel color number beneath each node and gathering a percentage of that by the maximum color number in the Perlin Noise. Here I use the same numbers to [...]