kinslowdian projects

Another Kinslowdian Project In Progress...

This has got a little held up with the mentally busy Summer I've had. But here's a little preview of another experimental project that I'm designing and developing without giving anything away. I've evolved a range of characters from a project I started near the end of University back in 2004. I wanted to do something more with them back then as the project seemed a bit limited down to lacking technical knowledge.

Here's a little swf testing out the events of each character. I've got a bunch more that are being pixelled up. One of them might even be a Goat.

http://simonkinslow.com/_as3/_chars/

A little iPhone icon + home screen image experiment.

Had a little bit of fun with the iPhone icon header tag in HTML. First I created a wallpaper image using the dimensions on my 3GS phone. Worked out where the icons would sit over this image on the home screen and created 16 57x57px png slices. Then added the link / reference to each icon png in their own html pages and added them one by one to my home screen.

More info on this header tag here: http://bit.ly/jiaSQ9

Controlling Birds On My Portfolio.

http://www.simonkinslow.com (flash required)

Roosting Amongst Levels, Rewritten in Actionscript 3.0.

Here is stage 1 of updating my portfolio in AS3. There have been some design changes with the background, making use of the full browser window and the lovely full screen mode. It wasn't just a case of migrating all the classes of the original into AS3, but rewriting parts to optimise the performance and to be less processor intensive. An example is the drop in frame rate and sound when you navigate away from the page to the other projects. Stage 2 will be adding the random jumping birds back in although this time, keyboard cursor keys will control the direction they jump.

Using Flash With Posterous via PosterousGet (AS3).

Following on from the AS2.0 tutorial using Flash with Posterous (http://bit.ly/bvBmMX). This is an AS3.0 class, to run it just requires a posterous username and url of a proxy file on your server.

The Class file is available from here along with a demo.fla (AS2 version now included):
http://www.simonkinslow.com/_poster/PosterousGet/

The class requires a function on your timeline or in a class (public function) called posterousGetComplete(); This is called from the Class file when all the XML data is ready and sorted into arrays ready to be transfered over to be used in whatever you want.

See a demo here:
http://www.simonkinslow.com/_poster/PosterousGet/

Basics:

import com.kinslowdian.PosterousGet;

var post:PosterousGet = new PosterousGet(this);

var postD:Array = new Array(); //array for dates of posts
var postT:Array = new Array(); //array for titles of posts
var postU:Array = new Array(); //array for urls of posts

//add your username eg "kinslowdian" and the url of your proxy file eg "http://www/site/proxy.php"
post.findPosts("posterous username", "http://www.your web site address/proxy.php");

function posterousGetComplete():void
{
    //update arrays
   
    postD = post.postDate;
    postT = post.postTitle;
    postU = post.postURL;
}

Experimenting With AS3 Water FX.

How Untitled 3 Might End Up Looking... Might!

Testing Out carbonmade.com

Put up a couple of things I've been creating recently, may be a good place to put new screen grabs of the final part to "Their Last Ever" and "Roosting Amongst Levels" as I progress with it. With Christmas and New year over and getting frustrated with online hackers on multiplayer Mario Kart I went back to Photoshop on Monday night to work up some ideas from sketches last year.

http://kinslowdian.carbonmade.com/

Roosting Amongst Levels.

Another project that's been in development since the last one went live. This will replace the current page at simonkinslow.com, and contains a mixture of ideas left over from theirlastever.com, and other ideas that were floating around when I created my last makeshift portfolio site in 2008 (the one with the hand). This should be live by December. I've noticed I'm starting to return to using paper textures again.

*** update ***

This is now live! http://www.simonkinslow.com

Using Flash With Posterous, (A Basic Example)

*** Update 8th Feb 2011:

AS3 Class version available, read post here: http://bit.ly/fdSpFb

This flash tutorial is basic and just an example, hopefully it doesn't sound too much like sucking eggs. The script is written in ActionScript 2.0, a similar method may work in ActionScript 3.0 but loading in the XML will be different using event listeners, and forming the url with the php may be too. You’ll need to set up a dynamic text box for the data, and a movieClip for a button/trigger on the first frame and give them instance names in properties:

TextBox instance name: post_txt

MovieClip instance name: test_mc

Download this .as file from http://www.simonkinslow.com/tutorial/codeBreakdown.as and either copy and paste into frame 1 or you can add this to frame 1: #include "codeBreakdown.as"

Before exporting the movie you'll need to place the proxy.php file on your web server and note the location.

Update the variable on line 7 (var proxyFile:String = "http://www.yoursite.com/proxy.php?data=";) with the url of the file (just change this address http://www.yoursite.com/proxy.php and leave ?data= at the end.

Update the variable on line 8 (var proxyURL0:String = "http://yourPosterousUserName.posterous.com/rss.xml";) slot your user name into "yourPosterousUserName" to link to your feed

Export and roll over the MovieClip and you should see a post!

Any problems try downloading the link available below (needs CS4 or later) or contact me:

http://www.simonkinslow.com/tutorial/posterousRandomPostFlash.zip