Teddy is a freeform 3d drawing program written in Java, way back in 1999 by Takeo Igarashi, an associate professor at the University of Tokyo. It’s quite an amazing little program. You can draw outlines and shapes, cutting and extruding as naturally as modeling clay. When you draw profiles, the wide areas become thick, and the narrow areas become thin. This allows you to draw natural organic shapes. What makes the program really beautiful is the way the program represents the 3d shapes as hatched sketches. You can download the program and run it on PC or Mac, and save your creations in Alias Wavefront OBJ format. Read more...
I just discovered The Lego Store at a nearby mall. I rarely visit malls (I’m actually a mall-phobic) so I had no idea such a thing existed. Walking into the store I felt a rush. It’s simply amazing. I’ve not been a fan of the sets they’ve been coming up with recently. I’ve always felt the pieces were too large and too specialized. Read more...
So sitting here watching the progress bar of my life creep along, I started thinking about all the progress bars I’ve seen. The first progress bar I got to know well was the 3d Studio MAX rendering progress bar. It suffered from the same usability malady that most progress bars do. If you think about the question that the progress bar anwsers, it should be “When are ya gonna be done?” Read more...
I’ve been racking my brain trying to use the old XML id attribute shortcut to quickly access XMLNodes. I couldn’t get it to work consistently when publishing to Flash Players 6, 7, or 8. In Flash 7, it seems that only uppercase node IDs work. In Flash 8, you need to use the idMap array to access your nodes directly. This works fine on its own, but if you try it in a class with an XML object in it, you’ll get this error:
There is no property with the name 'idMap'.
I did a little digging and found this blog that posted this solution: Read more...
When naming your library fonts, don’t precede your symbol name with an underscore. I created some font symbols and preceded the names with an underscore so that they would float to the top. Flash gets confused and thinks they are system fonts, and gets wiggy if you try to choose an antialiasing method. Basically, it treats them as device fonts in the IDE, so Flash won’t let you embed the fonts or choose any antialiasing option. Read more...
