I got back from Brighton yesterday, exhausted after 3 days of excellent sessions and some heavy drinking sessions too!

The high points for me were Mario Klingemann’s “2D or not 2D, that is the question” talk about working with BitmapData. He showed how to make a “Magic Wand” tool a la photoshop. His process was impressive to say the least, and I’m very interested in playing with the paletteMap method of the BitmapData class.

The session from André Michelle was amazing, he demoed his PopForge sound synthesis engine. Generating sound entirely within flash at run-time. See the video below, this is all generated and manipulated in flash. It’s simply amazing, I can’t wait to get some time (after this post) to start messing around with sound in flash.

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I’ve recently been doing some games work that required some pretty full on physics, after battling with vectors and collision reflection on wheels and other objects, I ditched what I had done and am now working with FlaDE (Flash Dynamics Engine) an AS 2.0 GPL Licensed API. It’s written by Alec Cove, and is very easy to use. It never went to final release, and he has now moved on to APE (ActionScript Physics Engine) which is written instead in AS 3.0 and is again GPL Licensed.

[slug]swfforcesize[/slug]Here's another add-on for SWFObject. This one allows you to create a full-window flash movie, but when the browser window is set below the specified size, the div containing the flash is kept at the minimum size and horizontal/vertical scrollbars are displayed.

Again it's easy to implement, you have to make a few small changes to the HTML/CSS/JavaScript
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The Actionscript Virtual Machine 2 (AVM2) is going open-source with Mozilla and Adobe joining forces. Tamarin will be a model for JavaScript 2.0 and ActionScript 3.0 and any other language that is fully ECMAScript 4 compliant. It's aim is to create a more unified scripting interface for RIAs in future, it should also enable much more 'native' language bridging, i.e. passing properly datatyped objects between JavaScript, ActionScript and JScript.

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/

I've had the mouse wheel working in flash on OS X for a while, and after seeing the SWFAddress add-on for deconcept's SWFObject embedding system, I thought I'd add mousewheel functionality to SWFObject, rather than using my own "frankenstein" embedding system.

It's straight forward to implement. Download SWFMacMouseWheel here.

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I'm currently putting together a library for release under a GPL license. It will include animation management classes, a core kernel and threading engine to remove the reliance on onEnterFrame events, and a debugging tool.

This lib is aimed at Flash Developers who predominantly work on animation intensive sites, rather than application development.