Inspiring Inspiration #1

First is this great infographic for a documentary called Waiting For ‘Superman’ which highlights a bunch of issues in America. I love the simple colours and textures in this and the animation is really smooth and flowing. The use of circles is awesome too! Secondly, an animated video clip for Don’t Give it Up by […]

June 22, 2010

Invisible Mouse

Here is a cool video that was posted over at the NUI Group forums. This guy has used infra-red lasers and a webcam along with CCV to track the users hand position and movement, which is then translated into cursor movements and clicks. Pretty cool idea.

June 19, 2010

AS3 – Getting the order of MovieClips in the stage

Here is yet another small code snippet which allows you to get the order of MovieClips that are positioned on the stage. Source for the demo above: Download

June 6, 2010

AS3 – Detecting Control, Shift and Alt keyboard shortcuts

Here is a snippet of code which allows you to detect keyboard shortcuts such as ctrl+[another key] and ctrl+shift+[another key]. I wasn’t able to find any decent examples of detecting shortcuts but after reading the AS3 documentation I found that the Keyboard event contains the following boolean properties So by simply checking if those properties […]

June 5, 2010

AS3 – Repositioning the ComboBox dropdown list

If you’re like me and you don’t mind using some of the built in components in Flash to quickly build a UI but hate the look of them, you’ve probably made your own skins for them which is all well and good. But sometimes there are little things that really annoy me like the ComboBox […]

DSI Multitouch construction – Part 3

Over the weekend I made a lot more progress on my multitouch coffee table. I also discovered some issues – firstly the original backlight emits way too much infra-red light so I am going to have to make a custom one out of ultra-bright LED strips, and secondly I don’t seem to be getting any […]

May 31, 2010

DSI Multitouch construction – Part 2

Here are some more shots of the work in progress of the DSI Multitouch Coffee table I’m building. Last week the Endlighten arrived. This wasn’t the easiest to acquire – in Australia the only option really was to buy a full sheet which would have cost $1000+. The best place to get cut-to-size acrylic is […]

May 25, 2010

Google Fonts API – It’s good and bad

Update 2017/07/17: This post was published a long time ago and a lot has changed since then. Now that font rendering has vastly improved in Browsers Google Fonts is a great choice for web fonts! Recently Google has announced a new API which allows web designers to use custom fonts in their HTML/CSS websites. This […]

May 21, 2010

Purple Squirrels Logo Ident

Here is a short logo ident I made for PurpleSquirrels in my spare time. It’s made in After Effects using Trapcode Particular, Form and Lux as well as Magic Bullet Mojo for a bit of colour grading.

May 18, 2010

32″ DSI Multitouch coffee table construction – Part 1

For a while now I have been planning a 32″ multitouch coffee table. DSI uses a special acrylic which when lit from the edges distrubutes even illumination across the panel. Over the last few weeks I have been collecting bits and pieces and this weekend I started making the top for the table. Photos below. […]

May 16, 2010

Who said Flash websites will need to be re-written?

Steve Jobs did in this blog post entitle ‘thoughs on Flash’. But if you watch the video below (thanks to this blog post by Lee Brimelow) you see that what Steve Jobs is just completely false. Here is what he said: “Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For […]

May 12, 2010

Flash running smoothly on Nexus One

Here is a video showing Flash content playing quite nicely on the Google Nexus One mobile phone. The first example demonstrated is great with the 3D interactive animations rendering really smoothly.

May 11, 2010