Hooray!

Large version here.

And if you're interested, here's the project in AIR form.

Why is this post entitled "Hooray!"? Well, because every little box that goes across your screen is a potential party! Click at the right time to smash through the colored boxes. Now, you may notice your confetti enlarges based on how many boxes you take out in one swipe - more smashes at once equals more party!

So...enjoy this! It's been sitting around my drive for a while in one form or another.

Menu 2 - A little more useful!

Here's the second menu in large form.

This might have a little more purpose. Imagine a contractor wants to offer his or her services, but wants to give potential clients an estimate on the type of work he or she does. Bingo! Done! This would also be useful for just about any shop that sells a variety of items...or any site that wants to show options of any sort, for that matter. Heck, a character artist could show off their creations in a gallery format!

Oh, and it's fairly dynamic - if you want to add another item, it's about a 30-second process (not counting whatever content you add to the panel at right). Yay expandability!

Menus! Menus! God, how I love menus!

Large version here.

Here is the first of two little menus I whipped up. I realized that this "does nothing" stuff is a lot of fun, but creating something that serves a purpose has its place, too! And so, here you go...

This one is a hypothetical color preview panel. It's not completely useful, but it would have its applications, I suppose. It needs just a few little extras to make it really useful. It wouldn't be a huge stretch to calculate the complementary color for the selected tile to show a little color palette. Anyway, enjoy!

If you didn't figure it out, you can roll over the colors to see them in the large panel. Click the "More" button to slide in a random assortment of new colors!

GloBounce

Hi there! Since I am delighting in being retarded and not being able to figure out the issue with embedding my .swf into a blog post, you can find the second iteration of the GloBounce here.

If you'd rather have a direct .swf download, you can find that here. Make sure you open that in dedicated Flash player, not just a web browser.

This isn't quite complete, and I may decide to go in a completely different direction with it. For now, though, you can influence the white bouncer's movement based on your mouse position. The bouncer only changes direction when he bounces, so you'll need to plan your movements! The further the mouse is from the bouncer at the time of the bounce, the higher the movement influence. You also control his bounce height this way.

At any time in the air, you can click to initiate a mini-bounce. You can only do this 10 times in the air. Once you hit the floor, your jumps are replenished (man, I should put a meter in there...).

Finally, the point of it - see those white circles? See how many of those you can smack before touching the floor! Some day, I might even have proper scoring in there!

Hope you enjoy.

Bouncin' Along...

If you're interested in seeing the next little experiment in progress, check it out here!

I'd recommend right-clicking and hitting "save as" to ensure that it displays in the proper bounds.

Bonus Post! Collatz Conjecture

I definitely suggest you look at the large version.

Actionscript, of course, is a programming language. And one thing computers and programming languages do much more efficiently than humans is...well...compute! We can use this to our advantage and help display very complex math problems nearly instantly. Flash is a wonderful tool to use in eLearning in that the behind-the-scenes number crunching can easily be reflected graphically.

In this case, I stumbled upon something called the Collatz Conjecture. It's a conjecture that basically says that if you start with an integer, you check to see if it's even or odd. If it's even, divide by 2. If it's odd, multiply it by 3 and add 1. Repeat that over and over, and you will ALWAYS wind up with a value of 1.

With larger numbers, this process could take quite a while...so...enter Flash! Simply type in a number you want to check (I've limited it to 8 digits) and click "Go!" to quickly see the resulting path to 1.

Dynamically Shifting Menu UPDATED

Large version.

Okay, as promised...I've updated this. I was considering making the image loading dynamic, but I kept running into little pitfalls. Nothing a little more time couldn't have solved, but there are already plenty of fantastic external image loaders out there!

Anywho, I've updated this into a photo gallery with a dynamically sized frame to house the images. To preserve the rounded corners' proportions, I enabled 9-slice scaling guides on the movie clip. If you're not aware of it, next time you create a movie clip, look for the little check box titled "Enable Guides for 9-Slice Scaling. When you go in to modify your movie clip, you'll see some dashed lines that are draggable. Whatever is inside of those guides will scale like you'd expect, but the four corners outside of the guides will NOT! Pretty fantastic when you're enlarging rounded curves, especially if the scaling is not proportionate.