Michael Bianco

Back From C4

Well, yesterday I came from C4. C4 was the first developers conference I have attended, and it was well worth going. I met lots of cool people: some who already have some apps out, some who havent released anything – yet. The Funny There is, at least for me, two pretty funny & memorable moments of C4. Before Brian W. Fitzpatrick gave his talk on the future of subversion he said “All information in this talk is under the NDA.” I immediately got really excited, I’ve never heard NDA information before, and this was about subversion, software I actually use! He follows that up with “Yeah, it is ‘Not Decided Apon’.” That gave me a good laugh 🙂 Aaron Hillegass was the guest speaker at C4…

Plus & Minus Icons

Continuing the trend of releasing common icons used in application development, I present you with the ubiquitous plus and minus (or add & remove as they are known in some parts) icons: You can download the tiff images and Pixen source files here. Feel free to use these icons in any of your projects.

Adding Methods to Core Flash Classes

Every once in a while I get an email that looks like this: I tried using your Object, Function, and String method additions. When I tried to compile I get a bunch of error messages! What do I do?! Yup, this is because the method definitions are not in the Class definition files that flash looks at when compiling. The core class definitions that Flash looks at are located here: [code]~/Library/Application Support/Macromedia/Flash MX 2004/en/Configuration/Classes[/code] That “Classes” folder will contain all the method definitions for all core Flash classes (MovieClip, Object, Button, Color, etc). To make my method additions compile correctly you’ll have to edit the corresponding Class definition files and add the method definitions in…

Green Check & Red Cross Circular Icons

One of the most annoying things about software development on os x is duplicating the look and feel of those cool ui widgets that Apple wont let us use. You know, those icons and widgets you spend hours on trying to get them to work like the “real thing”. For an application I’ve been working on I wanted a little green check icon (ala software update) and a red cross icon. Took me a little photoshopping but I think I got two small icons that look pretty good. You can download a zip with the tif & psd images here. Feel free to use the icons in any of your projects.

WWDC Announcement Thoughts

The announcements this year are not as impressive as last year. Probably the most exciting thing for most people this year is the new Mac Pro: 16GB of RAM, 2TB of storage, dual 64 bit 3GHZ processors. Wow, I want one. I am sort of disappointed with the end-user Leopard features. The time machine idea sounds and looks cool, but I’m wondering how useful it will be and how much it will slow down my computer. The improvements to iChat are very welcome, and the screen sharing feature looks incredible. Spaces looks awesome, finally we are going to get built in virtual desktops. I really don’t use Dashboard or iCal, so changes to those areas of the OS don’t really affect me…

Here Goes Nothing

A couple days ago I went ahead and bought my first guitar, a Fender DG-8. Hopefully with this guitar, a couple teach-yourself DVDs, some books, and some help from my guitar-playing friends I’ll be able to become half-way decent at the guitar. Wish me luck!

XASH 1.3

XASH 1.3 has finally been released!..

Task Manager

Today I departed on a search for a task manager (AKA To-Do list) for os x that would suite my fancy. I guess I’m pretty picky because I didn’t really find anything computer application I really liked. Most of the applications I found were either too tied to iCal (which I don’t use at all), made 2+ years ago and haven’t been updated since, just to complicated to be simply a glorified to-do list, or just plain ugly to look at. I guess I’m more picky than most when it comes to Mac applications: I want a great looking fully functional Cocoa based mac application. My search finally ended, but instead of finding a mac application to suite my needs, I found a nifty little web-application; GTDTiddlyWiki…

Two Web-Dev Tips

Applying Filters To a Loaded Image I haven’t done any Flash work in awhile, and I guess I forgot the amount of quirks it has (although its getting much better). Applying filters to a loaded image doesn’t work. I loaded a MC using this code: [code] var loader = new MovieClipLoader(); var listener = {onLoadInit:Delegate.create(this, imageLoaded)}; loader.addListener(listener); loader.loadClip(“pic.png”, holder); [/code] Then tried to apply a filter like so: [code] var blur = new flash.filters.BlurFilter(30, 0, 3); holder.filters = [blur]; [/code] But nothing happened. The filter works fine on a MC containing a image from the library. The solution?..

Transparent PNG To JPG Conversion

Converting a semi-transparent PNG to a JPG without severe artifacts or “transparent area color meshing” is a much harder task than you would expect. I thought it would be as simple as loading the image into Image_Transform and using _generate(null, ‘jpg’) to convert the image to a jpeg. Well, that code will convert it to a jpeg, but all the areas that are semi-transparent end up looking absolutely horrible becoming sort of flattened…

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