The Latest Dish
It's the day after July 4th, and I can still taste the hot dogs. I usually eat quite healthy, and drink only liquor or wine. Yesterday though was filled with hours of keg drinkin', hamburger and hot dog eatin', and listening to the "Top 1000 Classic Rock Songs of All Time" on the radio. We were all Kid Rock for a day. (Photos coming).
Other than the nice break from reality, I've been working on a number of different projects lately. Two are for brand new clients, one for a rather large, notable company that I can't say anything more about quite yet.
I've also been experimenting with the new sound objects in Flash MX by re-coding the Jobim turntable I created two years ago in Flash 4. The file is riddled with gnarly Flash 4 ActionScript, rampant duplication of symbols and movie clips, and not a single function in the code (functions were still foreign to me at that time). All things considered, I'm amazed the turntable worked at all.
One of the greatest limitations of using sound in Flash 4 (and 5 for that matter) was that Flash couldn't detect when a sound stopped. It could loop, fade in, fade out, and stop, but triggering events when a sound finished required plenty of ridiculous trickery. In the case of the my turntable, the needle moving across the record isn't the least bit intelligent. It animates at a frame rate approximately close to the length of the sound clip, but it's not exact. On a fast machine, it stops too soon. On a slow one, it continues to move after the sound has stopped. Two years later, the application has finally caught up with my original idea.
By using the new Sound.onSoundComplete event handler, the needle movement can be perfectly matched to the length of the audio. Now I just need to figure out how to let users grab the arm and scratch the vinyl (seriously, I think I know how to do it).
Stay tuned.
Comments
Can you recommend some good sites on learning flash? I would like to pick up another skill set, and hopefully do more than the zoom text site intro...
Posted by: phil at July 5, 2002 11:31 PM
The animated turntable is neat and makes an evocative image to use with the music. There was one little detail that bothered me though. The reflection on a spinning record doesn't actually spin with the record. It stays put, perhaps wavering slightly. Of course, this would more subtle, animation-wise, and it might not look like it's spinning at all. You could maybe put something on the label to show the spinning.
Posted by: Mark at July 6, 2002 2:43 AM
phil, visit the links below for flash resources....
http://www.flashkit.com
http://www.were-here.com
http://www.ultrashock.com
http://www.moock.org
http://www.studiowhiz.com
http://www.actionscripts.org
Posted by: Josh Dura at July 6, 2002 11:31 AM
