For ages when I train InDesign, I always get the question – once you have created a star or polygon within InDesign, can you change the number of sides/points afterwards. Each time I would tell the trainee – no.
I have never seen any documentation, notes, tips, etc that tell me this was possible.
However, I was playing around InDesign a couple of days ago, creating polygons, and I suddenly thought – what if i draw the shape, double-click on the polygon tool and change the number of sides, whilst my shape is still selected?
As I mentioned previously, Box2DFlash 2.1 is quite different from previous versions of Box2DFlash.
The major differences that I have found so far, are related to how to setup your world and your bodies (bearing in mind that I have only just started with Box2DFlash, and do not know the previous versions).
It took me a while to get my head around the Box2DFlash 2.1 relationship between fixtures, shapes, and bodies.
I recently decided to have a play with Box2DFlash. This is a port of a popular 2D physics engine that has been ported to Actionscript 3, Java, C#, etc.
A lot of games use Box2DFlash and so I thought it was about time to play around with it.
Also, i thought it would be a nice idea to blog about my progress. I will be using Flash Builder 4 (beta) to do all my work in, but the files can be used in Flash, or a.n.other development environment.
Firstly you will need to download the files from here…
Every so often i come across sites that give away free icons, textures, etc. I particularly look out for free textures, as i use them in my 3D and actionscript work.
So i thought, let’s put it in a blog and share it around. Here are a list of web sites that i have found.
If anyone has any others, let me know.
Recently I blogged about how I was going to start to use Processing. Since then I have realised that the Processing application is way too basic for me. Using Eclipse or Flash Builder much of the time I naturally looked to see if there was a way of bringing in Processing to the Eclipse environment, and very quickly I found the following link…
http://www.creativecoding.org/en/beyond/p5/eclipse_as_editor
Since Processing uses Java, I decided to download the standard Eclipse package. Following the instructions from the link above I quickly got a simple applet working. However I came across a couple of minor issues. Now I used to use Java, but many years ago, so I was quite rusty regarding the Java language, but when I create a simple applet, I immediately got this error…
I have just been having a play with the new Drupal 7 Alpha version and it is looking very nice. For those who haven’t come across Drupal it is an open source content management system built on PHP and MySQL and powers many popular sites such as Nasa, Warner Brothers, Greenpeace, Britney.com and of course Highlander.co.uk. 
The first thing you will notice is that the whole install process has been given a make over and is a bit smoother (and simpler). There are even options to include common modules with the install, and select languages at install, neither of which were there previously.
One of the applications that I keep an eye on is an open source app called Blender. I think it is a fantastic 3D application.
But it does a lot more – particles, games, physics, compositing, and so on.
Previously it suffered from a non-standard interface, and so was quite difficult for newbies to download and just run with it.
However there is a new version coming out, version 2.5, which is in alpha at the moment, and I would recommend anyone who is into 3D to download Blender 2.5 alpha and play with it.
Like a lot of people, I suspect, I tend to buy books, download source files, and squirrel them away somewhere, saying to myself – I will read them, I will go through the files – and, inevitably, you don’t.
However, this being a new year and all, I thought in order to push myself to learn something new, why not blog about it and take everybody along for the ride.
And for this purpose I have chosen to learn Processing – and I have also chosen to start with this book…
The Essential Guide to processing for Flash developers
Happy new year everybody – and in january this year I am in the process of creating a new, advanced, actionscript 3 course – during which I decided to do some particle work.
Here are some particle systems that I came across in the process…
…the latter is a new system, and I must say that I am impressed.
It is a nice system, easy to use, good documentation, and some lovely demos.
In particular, have a look at this one…
Check Stardust out, you will not be disappointed.
I came across a situation recently where the skype extension for firefox was messing up the layout of a page. Basically the page looked fine in all major browsers, however when you opened it up in firefox with the skype extension for firefox enabled it messed with the formatting of the page. If you have the same problem you can fix it simply by adding the following meta tag to your page:
<meta name=”SKYPE_TOOLBAR” content=”SKYPE_TOOLBAR_PARSER_COMPATIBLE” />
this effectively just blocks the skype extension from working. Once you have done this only phone numbers formatted with tags as follows will be recognised by the skype exxtension: