Nike has launched the “Nike Dunk: Kicks Creator”. The Kicks Creator allows Nike fans to design their own shoes by coloring and painting directly onto a 3D model of a Nike Dunk in Flash. The Kicks Creator goes beyond simply choosing colors, it allows Dunk fans access to an assortment of materials, design patterns, and graphics which they can use to completely personalize their sneakers.
After creating a shoe, designers can submit their creations into the Kicks Creator Battle, a head-to-head competition where the general public gets to determine the best designs.
The Nike Dunk: Kicks Creator was developed in Actionscript 3 and uses Papervision 2.0 to render the shoe model in real time. You can view one of my entries 3D.
I recently had need of an arrow drawing function in Flash which I wanted to use to annotate diagrams. I was unable to find one through Google that suited my needs, so I decided to roll my own Actionscript class for drawing arrows. I tried to keep the arrow drawing interface easy to use but flexible. It draws a clean vector outline of the arrow, so you can use the graphics.lineStyle and graphics.beginFill to set the color styles.
Figure 1. A sample of the various styles of arrow that can be easily created with GraphicsUtil.drawArrow
There are some challenges in Flash that are addressed with such regularity that it can be surprising that no uniform way of accomplishing these tasks has emerged. One of these challenges is dynamic flash movie resizing through JavaScript. While websites have been doing this for years and the techniques involved are simple, there are enough moving parts involved to make it a chore to recode and deploy every time you launch a new site. BrowserCanvas bundles all of the code necessary to do Flash resizing into a single ActionScript file which is easy to deploy and reuse. It takes care of a lot of the maintenance work necessary to do Flash JavaScript resizing so that it can be deployed with minimal effort.
This weekend I had some time to work with Adobe AIR and I’ve walked away with a different impression of it than I thought I would. While I wouldn’t say my opinion of it has improved, I would say it’s a different product than I thought it was.
When I was working on the current redesign of this site, I toyed with the idea of integrating a robot character into the site’s identity. With a site name like “doesnotcompute”, it seemed like the logical thing to do. I was unhappy with the results I came up with and abandoned the idea.
Out of this experimentation, however, I created the following Flash prototype of “curious” robots. The robots will watch and approach the mouse cursor, but will flee in fear if the mouse cursor gets too close. You can single out a robot and chase him around with the mouse while the others watch. This is both cruel and fun.
This site’s current three circle logo comes from the design of these robot’s “eyes”. The current logo, however, reuses the Trade Gothic “o” instead of a filled circle.
Way back in 1999, I went to an exhibit on emergent behaviors at the now defunct Boston Computer Museum. While I had seen Conway’s Game of Life demonstrated before, I enjoyed it a lot more after seeing it in the context of this exhibit.
Figure 1. A screenshot of Pestilence. Red is newly created life, black is life that has been alive for at least one step, white is empty space.
That same year, I created my first Life simulation in Flash 4. Unfortunately, Flash was not quite fast enough at that time to make much more than a small grid that slowly crawled along. The result was not particularly impressive.
Today however, Flash is a bit faster, as are most of our computers. I spent some time yesterday creating a life simulator in AS3. I applied a couple of bitmap filters to it in order to make the appearance more dramatic. You can view the real-time simulation at the bottom of this post.