Recently I was working on Flash and needed a calendar control, but Flash’s built-in component library doesn’t include a DateChooser for AS3, and searching around turned up nothing ready-made either, so I wrote one myself for AS3. (The rendered UI is based on com.thomas.DatePicker.DatePicker.) Sharing it with anyone else who needs one for Flash development.

A puzzle game made by Tomorrow Angel Studio together with Little Sky for Ciwong Technology (www.ciwong.com). The UI and animations were done by Little Sky of Tomorrow Angel Studio; I wrote the program and the website integration. 1. Counting Blocks The shape in the Flash movie is built from several small blocks. Use your spatial imagination — count how many small blocks the shape is made of in total. Left-click the number buttons “1~9” to enter your answer; if you get it right, you earn the corresponding score. Demo link http://www.mousebomb.org/portfolio_demo/jiyi_mofang/mofang.html Screenshots

Spotted this article translated by auzn over on Tiandihui — Eaze, the newest member of the easing family. Reportedly more efficient than TweenLite and packed with features. Bookmarked. Eaze was designed to: Make tweening in Flash lightweight, eye-catching, and easy to use, Introduce the smartest syntax and event system, Deliver the best performance balance, Use as few classes as possible, with no dependencies. The result is a maximally optimized, compact little library (~4Kb for the raw engine + ~9Kb with all plugins included) with jQuery-like syntax.

Yesterday I ran into a memory leak. After digging all the way down, I found it was caused by the bitmap captured for the reflection in an external .swf that had been loaded not being cleared. My guess is that although loader.unloadAndStop() closes the stream, it doesn’t release the BitmapData created inside the loaded program. Keep this in mind: aside from purely media-playback objects, if the external program you load has listeners, callbacks, or has created BitmapData, then that external program needs to clean up after itself before it’s unloaded. Otherwise, no matter how much you gc, it’ll still be eating memory.

On the 4th of this month, gskinner.com released version 2 of GTween. This version is more compact (3.5k) than the previous one, runs more efficiently, and introduces a new plugin model for greater ...

Flash SwitcherLets Firefox switch between different versions of the Flashplayer plugin, for compatibility debugging. This extension allows you to easily switch from one flash player plugin version to another, or also to remove or save the currently installed plugin (maybe for testing the express install). Once installed you will find the “flash switcher” icon in the Firefox statusbar at bottom right (and also in the Tools Firefox menu). Click on it and a list of available options will appear.

After updating the old FDT to 3.5beta, you have to crack it all over again. Thanks to halley for sending me the crack patch — sharing it here with anyone else who needs it. Click to download the FD...

The new site went into design and development on July 27 this year, mostly in my spare time. And now the construction is finally done — it’s shipped. http://www.mousebomb.org/ the homepage now redirects to the new version — go take a look. The new version really did drag on. Since the 2007 version I hadn’t updated my personal site for ages. In fact, before building this one I designed two other versions — one during Spring Festival 2008, and another in late September 2008. One of them was going to have a star-travel theme. On the first visit a login box would pop up saying “Commander, welcome back” (just like Tiberium Wars). Once inside, you’d see a galaxy where visitors piloted a spaceship to explore planets, could send out cosmic radio waves to chat, and so on.

A few days ago I watched the movie 9 — mediocre plot, but grand visuals — and the images of those future robots are still vivid in my mind. Yesterday, the big Flash game Machinarium entered my gaming journey.

Requires Flash Player 10