For some reason, I always have trouble finding and download the Flash ActionScript 3 language documentation. The LiveDocs are easy to find, but the zipped documentation – which is super useful to have locally for faster access and for quick help at the press of F1 if you install it on a tool like FDT […]

In the past few months, it’s surprising the number of times I’ve had to play a video in Flash (in either FLV or F4V format) and know its current time (or current frame) accurately – specially because we’ve been using a lot of shape tracking, to project a Flash content-based plane on top of a […]

In a previous post, I published a method to distort an image by its corners with proper perspective distortion, using the new drawTriangle() methods from Flash 10. That was used for a website I had to develop about an year ago at Firstborn, where we had (mostly) static content projected to 3d screens. It just […]

Update: if you’re using swfobject to embed the SWF, this post may still be useful, but there’s some better, simpler alternatives to finding the SWF element id. Read the comments to read about them. The original article follows, and is suitable for all situations in which you have a SWF embedded in a page. In […]

In my day-to-day doing development at Firstborn, it’s pretty common that we run into questions that don’t have a very clear answer – for example, what would be the best technique to do something (in terms of performance). When something like that happens, depending on the time constraints, we may either do some quick test, […]

Scaleform has announced that Scaleform GFx, their Flash-based solution for graphical user interfaces for games, is set to be included free of charge with the Unreal engine. They’ve made a nice video of the thing in action, going all the way from the Flash IDE to a new menu and interface for Unreal Tournament III. […]

Pretty bold title, uh? Before I even begin, let me say two things. First, this is a pretty obvious use for the new Flash 10 drawing API, so I’m quite sure somebody has created something similar already, specially because it’s something I can see a lot of people in need of. Second, please read the […]

One of the interesting things about working at Firstborn is that from time to time employees will host “Group Therapy” sessions, which are nothing other than presentations on diverse topics (read more about the idea behind this in this great article by former Firstborn employee Jens Fischer). A week or so ago I had the […]