Last week I found myself needing to convert a colour image to black and white and here’s how I did it!

import flash.filters.ColorMatrixFilter;
import fl.motion.AdjustColor;
//==========================
var color : AdjustColor;
var colorMatrix : ColorMatrixFilter;
var matrix : Array;
var filterBW : Array;
color = new AdjustColor();
color.brightness = 20;
color.contrast = 20;
color.hue = 0;
color.saturation = -100;
matrix = color.CalculateFinalFlatArray();
colorMatrix = new ColorMatrixFilter(matrix);
filterBW = [colorMatrix];

Now we can set the .filters property of our image to be filterBW, and shazam you have a black and white image.

I have been thinking about building a visualiser since 2003 (when I saw one on www.2advanced.com) and have finally found the time to look into AS3′s computeSpectrum as well as Richard Lords’ FLiNT Particle System and came up with this example which uses Jamie T’s – The Man’s Machine (which you can buy here).

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Just recently I had some time and decided to take a look at the flash api for google maps. Initially I didn’t have a plan, I just wanted to start using the api, but once I realised how easy it was to get setup I thought I should try and do something a little bit more interesting, so I decided to see if I could track and tag myself across London.

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www.fashionair.com is all about well… fashion, reading about it, talking about it, watching it,and  buying it. The site has lots of dynamically driven, CMS managed flash pages with tons of lovely videos and imagery. It has a massive selection of products  to browser through and buy which are linked to across the site from blogs, articles, and videos.

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You’d think that there would be a way to clear BitmapData maybe something like BitmapData.clear(), but when is anything that simple. So far the best I’ve come up with is…

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This is a little mashup experiment I’ve been working on recently which utilises the lastFM, amazon, and youtube API’s to create an interesting visual interface to display my recently played tracks scrobbled from my iPod.

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The brief on this one was to build an iTunes-esque coverflow to showcase Miomni’s IPTV channels, each cover needed the ability to display images, videos, and some information about the channel.

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When flash is embeded within a HTML page it doesn’t by default have focus, this means it won’t capture things such as keyboard interaction. However there is a very simple fix using swfObject to embed your flash movie and a simple bit of Javascript.

Add this javascript function to your header..

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Why is it when just when you think a project is almost there some kind of nasty bug rears its ugly head, thats what happenned to me today when I uploaded my swf to the test server for the first time and tested it in the browser.

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Last week I ran into some trouble when trying to load images dynamically in flash, 99% of the time my images loaded in as they should but at what seemed like random intervals and image would suddenly fail to appear, this was only happening in Firefox or Safari, IE has never as far as I can tell failed to load an image when I’ve been using it to test this project. At first I thought it might be a problem with the platform the site was running on however after some testing I was able to rule this out so I turned back to my trusty friend Charles the Web Debugging Proxy for some help.

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