I discovered today whilst running Windows 7 on my mac using the latest version of Parallels 5 (which is a huge improvement over the earlier versions) that you can actually turn off Windows features like Internet Explorer, Windows Search, that Gadget Platform thing and other media features - the ones that were really annoying in any earlier Window OS. How clever of Microsoft to do that for us - nice!

Ok so here's how you do it -
1.    Go to Start > Control Panel > select Programs & Features.
2.    In the left hand side of the pane, click Turn Windows Features On Or Off.
3.    From here, scroll through the list and just select or deselect the check boxes to enable or disable those annoying Windows features and then click OK.

There will be 5.2 billion smartphones by 2011. 20 million mobiles are lost or stolen every year. Recycled phones typically go to China and Nigeria – countries having a high security threat! How much can your smartphone reveal about you? You need to read this... http://tinyurl.com/yjg54bg

Actionscript 3.0 didn't get a lot of support by those making the move from AS2. But Wonderwall's website has proven its sophistication. Wonderwall is an interior design firm established by Masamichi Katayama. Check out their site. It's fluid and... oh-so sexy! and definitely does justice to their work.

Apple has over 75,000 mobile apps available for download, Nokia < 5,000 Blackberry less. 50% of iPhone users buy Apps – generating US$200 million per month. 19% of handsets running Google Android OS buy Apps. Given that 50% of the world pays to use a mobile phone and only 23% have internet access (according to UN’s International Telecommunication Union) it would seem that mobile apps will become as important as the internet in the near future.

So you have some old sites that you frequently use, and some of them work better with Flash Player 9, or in my instance use an uploader that has not been rewritten for Flash Player 10.

You only need it now and then - what do you do? Can you have both? Yes you can and here is how I did it.

Everyone is different, so to commence with I have a MacPro running 10.6.1 - you could be on 10.5 on a MacBook - shouldnt really make a difference, but I could be wrong.

You could download the flash player uninstaller, but when i tried it just sat there wheeling away and basically doing bugger all - so I canned it. Perhaps it's not 10.6 ready...

1) I went to

Macintosh HD > Library > Internet Plug-Ins

2) Then, I selected the following files:

Player Enabler.plugin
Flash Player.plugin
flashplayer.xpt

3) I then created a new folder called 'FP10' and put the 3 files above there. As long as these files are not in the  main folder, your browsers wont find them and thus no flash player.

4) Here is where Adobe make things hard. You have to download the a 200mb download just to get to a 4mb file - thanks Adobe!

Download this

http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/installers/archive/fp9_archive.zip

Then unzip it and go to

fp9_archive > 9r246 > flashplayer9r246_ub_mac.dmg

That puts two new files into

Macintosh HD > Library > Internet Plug-Ins

Flash Player.plugin
flashplayer.xpt

And these are the Flash Player 9 pluggins.

Thats it - your now using FP9.

If you want to flip back up to FP10 - put those two files above into a new folder and call it FP9. Place the other 3 files back into the root directory from your F910 folder and your ready to rock again.

Hope that helps!

I'm going to show you how to use dynamic variable names in php. It's quite simple, just put your variable name in between {} symbols.

// declare prefix. In a loop this would probably be a number.
$prefix = "pfx";
 
// build your variable
${"varname_{$prefix}"}    = "success";
 
//This would output "success"
echo $varname_pfx;

Simple isn't it....

Recently I was playing around with scaling background images and had issues with how the scaling behaved and image quality.  When scaling an image in proportion you want to make sure that the image container is centered to the movie clip it belongs to.

My example below is the scaling code within a stage listener which will re size the background image according to the stage width & height.

Stage.align = "TL";
Stage.scaleMode = "noScale";
 
//Get Background Image Container Movie Clip Name (instance)
var backgroundImage:movieClip = "MovieClip Instance Name"
 
// Create an object for the stage listener
stageListener:Object = new Object();
 
// Create a function for the event you want to listen for
stageListener.onResize = function() {
 
//Get the  stage width & height
var sw:Number = Stage.width;
var sh:Number = Stage.height;
 
//Check to see if image width or height needs adjusting
if ((sh / sw) > (backgroundImage._height / backgroundImage._width)) {
 
//get image width and adjust height to fit
scale = backgroundImage._width / backgroundImage._height;
backgroundImage._height = sh;
backgroundImage._width = sh * scale;
} else {
 
//get image height and adjust width to fit
scale =backgroundImage._height / backgroundImage._width;
backgroundImage_width = sw;
backgroundImage._height = sw * scale;
}
 
//Center the background Image
backgroundImage._x = (sw - backgroundImage._width) / 2;
backgroundImage._y = (sh - backgroundImage._height) / 2;
 
};
// Add listener for the Stage object
Stage.addListener(stageListener);

Now the the simple line of code that makes this work so well is the quality preservation part. Just add this after your dynamic image has loaded.

backgroundImage.forceSmoothing = true;

An actionscript 3 version would not be much different to this and should be fairly easy to workout. If your struggling just ask me on my blog http://www.flashnutz.com.

Designers tend to pride themselves on their ability to name a random font, but every now and then a font will come along that can stump even the best know-it-all.

Well fear no more, as myfonts.com has brought out an iPhone app that will save your reputation – WhatTheFont.

WhatTheFont allows you to take a photo of any font, whether it be in a magazine or a web graphic, upload the image to the MyFonts server and in seconds have the correct font identified.

Best of all, WhatTheFont is free. Give it a try, it could get you out of a typography emergency.

One technique of loading external images is using the Loader class.

It's similar to the URLLoader class but the Loader class loads and displays loaded images and SWF content. The Loader class is a part of the DisplayObject class; it is capable of displaying content as well as loading it.

To load external images using the Loader class, you need to create an object of the Loader class.

var imgLoader:Loader = new Loader();

To load an image into the Loader Object, the load method of the Loader class is used, along with a URLRequest.

var imgLoader:Loader = new Loader();
imgLoader.load(new URLRequest('image.jpg'));

The LoaderInfo class also has events and event types that dispatch information about the progress of the load through the Loader class.

The code below traces a loaded message after the loader object has completed loading the image.

var imgLoader:Loader =  new Loader();
imgLoader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListner(Event.COMPLETE,
loaderCompleteHandler);
 
function loaderCompleteHandler(e:Event):void{
   trace('Image has loaded.');
}
 
imgLoader.load(new URLRequest('image.jpg'));

At this point all you have done is loaded in the image to the Loader Object. For the loaded image to display you will need to add the Loader object to the display list.

addChild(imgLoader);

The complete source code looks like this.

var imgLoader:Loader =  new Loader();
imgLoader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListner(Event.COMPLETE,
loaderCompleteHandler);
 
function loaderCompleteHandler(e:Event):void{
   trace('Image has loaded.');
   addChild(imgLoader);
}
 
imgLoader.load(new URLRequest('image.jpg'));

Now your ready to build a preloader in ActionScript 3. Let's build it.

I'm sure most of us use swfObject, which in my opinion is the best option when it comes to embedding flash.

Lately I've been having a lot of fun with mootools and needed a way to embed flash dynamically. Basically I wanted my flash file to be embedded after a mootools click event was triggered.

So without further ado..

window.addEvent('domready', function() {
 
//get the div I want to embed my flash into.
var flashcontainer = $('flashcontainer');
 
//set all the flash properties
var file = 'file.swf';
var moviename = 'nameMyFlash';
var width = '640';
var height = '424';
var version = '9';
var bgcolor = '#000000';
 
//create the function that will fuse swfObject with mootools
var embedFlash = function(){
    var so = new SWFObject(file, moviename, width, height, version, bgcolor);
	     so.addParam("quality", "high");
	     so.addParam("align", "middle");
	     so.addParam("play", "true");
	     so.addParam("loop", "true");
	     so.addParam("scale", "exactfit");
             so.addParam("allowFullScreen", "true");
	     so.addVariable("variable1", "variable 1 value goes here");
	     so.addVariable("variable2", "variable 1 value goes here");
	     so.write(flashcontainer);
}
 
//get button by id
var myButton = $('mybutton'); 
 
// create click event to fire my function called "embedFlash()"
myButton.addEvent('click', embedFlash); 
 
});

And that's it.. Hope it helps....

You can download the latest tools used above from the links below:
MooTools - download release 1.2.3 or SWFObject 2.2