Life of a Glasgow Flash Developer

What I’ve been upto

Paul Bainbridge — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 14:24:44 +0000

I cannot believe how quickly the past 6 months have flown by. Has it really been since January since I last made a blog post. It’s to easy to just tweet rather than post something to the blog.

I would like to say it has been a busy 6 months but that would be lying. This year was the slowest start to the year for me since I started freelancing over 10 years ago. So with all that free time I started to take a serious look at development with AIR for android and Ipad. Still got nothing to show at the moment but things are moving along nicely.

Things have also been moving along nicely with dopeawards. Some nice new features have been added to help improve the UI. You can check them out here.

I’ve set-up a new twitter account as I feel it’s time to drop the @glasgow_flasher account. You can now follow me @scotflash. I would like to thank all the peeps(tweeps) that have started following my second account. I’ve also taken a moment to get set up with google+. You can find me here. Need an invite? Linky

Save masked image to server. AS3

Paul Bainbridge — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 13:21:31 +0000

This is a follow up to my previous post Crop bitmapdata under mask to create new bitmap. In this example I’ve set-up to allow for the cropped image to be saved out from flash to the server. There is also an additional php script to handle the data being sent from flash to create the exported jpg.
Below is the code that is used to save the cropped image to the server and then load it back into flash.

//Save cropped image to the server.
function saveCroppedImage(e:Event):void {
//Matrix to holder the area to be cropped
var maskRect =mcHolder.mcMask.getBounds(mcHolder);
//Matrix of image to be cropped
var imgMatrix= mcHolder.mcImg.transform.matrix;
//Cropped image
var myCroppedImage:Bitmap = cropImage(maskRect, imgMatrix, mcHolder.mcMask.width, mcHolder.mcMask.height,mcHolder.mcImg );
//Get new matrix of cropped image
var m:Matrix = myCroppedImage.transform.matrix;
var urlLoader:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
//Set jpg quality of the image to be export 1-100
var myEncoder:JPGEncoder = new JPGEncoder(80);
//Create jpg to be exported
var jpgSource:BitmapData = new BitmapData (mcHolder.mcMask.width, mcHolder.mcMask.height);
jpgSource.draw(myCroppedImage, m);
//Create byte array to hold jpg data
var byteArray:ByteArray = myEncoder.encode(jpgSource);
var header:URLRequestHeader = new URLRequestHeader("Content-type", "application/octet-stream");
//Send image to the server to be saved
var saveJPG:URLRequest = new URLRequest(_path+"saveImage.php?r="+imgID);
saveJPG.requestHeaders.push(header);
saveJPG.method = URLRequestMethod.POST;
saveJPG.data = byteArray;
urlLoader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, loadCroppedImage);
urlLoader.load(saveJPG);
}

Here is an example:
Drag the image around then click “crop image”. The second image that appears has been loaded from the server and clicking on “view in browser” will display the saved image in a new browser window.

Source example:

Credits: vamapaull, Photo Booth – Flash Webcam Image Capture (insight into export an image from Flash)

Crop bitmapdata under mask to create new bitmap AS3

Paul Bainbridge — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 14:54:42 +0000

So you want to be able to crop an image based on what is viewable through the mask and then saved that cropped image out to a new file. For two days I played about with code to trying to get this to work. The main problem for me was that the image would be dragged about underneath the mask. This was proving a bit confusing for me in getting the coordinates to crop from. Well thankfully I was able to get it to work the way I wanted. So now that I have it working I thought I would share the code as whilst doing research for a solution I didn’t find anything of real use.

function toCrop(e:Event):void {
//Matrix to holder the area to be cropped
var maskRect =mcHolder.mcMask.getBounds(mcHolder);
//Matrix of image to be cropped
var imgMatrix= mcHolder.mcImg.transform.matrix;
//Cropped image
var myCroppedImage:Bitmap = crop(maskRect, imgMatrix, mcHolder.mcMask.width, mcHolder.mcMask.height,mcHolder.mcImg );
addChild( myCroppedImage );
}
function crop( rect, matrix, _width:Number, _height:Number, displayObject:DisplayObject):Bitmap {
//Create cropped image
var croppedBitmap:Bitmap = new Bitmap( new BitmapData( _width, _height ), PixelSnapping.ALWAYS, true );
croppedBitmap.bitmapData.draw(displayObject, matrix , null, null, rect, true );
return croppedBitmap;
}

Here is an example:
Drag the image around then click “crop image”

Source example:

Youtube chromeless player flash source

Paul Bainbridge — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 12:42:11 +0000

Following on from my recent post ‘Youtube chromeless player example‘ I’ve finally found the time to get this example source put up available for download.

So here’s the brief.
The raw code for the Youtube API can be found here. The API is available in both AS2 and AS3. This is a basics you need to get started creating your own chromeless player example in AS3. You can download an sample AS2 version fla from here. You can of course skip this and go ahead and download my moded AS3 version of the chromeless player and hack it to fit your own needs. In my example I’ve set it up so that you can set set the video id in flash embed params and on url like here: www.scotflash.co.uk/youtube/?id=8hn15ugMJ4k. If no id is found then flash will load a default video id already set inside the swf.

The source is fully commented and includes both the fla file and html embed page to get you on your way.

New Dope awards

Paul Bainbridge — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 18:56:29 +0000

It’s been a hard graft over the past few months and we finally find ourselves at a point where we are happy to get all these updates live. After 10 years of awarding the worlds best Flash websites, Dope is changing to create an amazing new resource of not just websites , but now the worlds best 3D Artists, 3D Animators and Photographers.

Dope will now be a site of 4 flavours, with each category complimenting and inspiring the others.

As well as the 4 award programs we are also adding a whole host of new features. You will start to see these new features added to the website shortly after the first launch.

We hope you enjoy the website and content. www.dopeawards.com