Yuji Tomita

SVN Tweener breaks previous versions. Revision 389

Did updating to SVN Tweener break everything?

I had downloaded Tweener from http://code.google.com/p/tweener/ a few months ago but needed to use it on a few GlowFilters. After doing some research I find out that the SVN trunk has support for GlowFilter and various other special properties.

After updating Tweener the rest of my Tweens broke. I started getting these errors:

## [Tweener] Error: The property ‘_blur_blurX’ doesn’t seem to be a normal object property of [object MovieClip] or a registered special property.

I looked into caurina.transitions.properties.FilterShortcuts and saw that they were labeled _Blur_blurX (capitalized letter) but that didn’t solve the problem.

I finally stumbled upon a forum post saying you must manually initialize the shortcuts so they are registered as specialproperties.

Basically, import whatever properties branch you need, like

import caurina.transitions.properties.FilterShortcuts

Then, before you use Tweener:

FilterShortcuts.init();

Done. It all works as it used to.

Tweener.addTween( mc, {delay:1, time:2, _blur_blurX:3 } );

Embedding Fonts in AS3 Only.

This post details how to embed fonts with only AS3.

Took a good 2 hours to come across the right information. Hopefully somebody else can benefit from this as well.

It looks like if you ever need to change the alpha on a TextField you need to embed the font. Here are the basics.

/// EMBED FONT ///
[Embed(source = "path_to_font", fontName= "myFont")]
public static var myFont:Class;
Font.registerFont(path_to_font_class);
/// CREATE TFORMAT ///
var format:TextFormat = new TextFormat();
format.font="myFont"
/// CREATE TFIELD ///
var tf:TextField = new TextField();
tf.embedFonts = true;
tf.defaultTextFormat = format;

Now you are finally good to go. tf.alpha=0, and sure enough, it works.

All energy flows according to the whims of the Great Magnet. What a fool I was to defy him.

I just watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. What a great movie. It might be my favorite movie ever, actually.

The scene during this quote is amazingly powerful. The right words with the right pictures is worth a million words. Maybe something words can’t even express.

And that, I think, was the handle – -that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

What a wonderful time. I wish I could witness that generation.

Writing HTML emails for Google Mail

HTML is rarely worth writing about, but this is just silly.

Google appears to butcher any attempt at a sane HTML email you may want to make. Why? I have no idea.

This Blog Post details many of the issues surrounding how Google Mail interprets HTML email.

Google Mail is a new webmail service that acts like an artifact of the early 1990s when web standards were primitive.

For one thing, Google Mail deletes any CSS style reference to a set of styles, no matter where it appears in the email. And fonts displayed in html tables, the only alternative to using styles, have the odd habit of appearing larger than intended no matter how the html email is coded.

I had to go through every tag and explicitly state the CSS styles on each element. Yes, every paragraph, every image, every table cell. Ridiculous. And this is enough of a pain that I lack motivation to test it on other email clients. I’d assume other clients don’t break by using this hack.

I absolutely hate this kind of behavior. I never liked messing with CSS in the first place, much less in an email. Its too… “magic”.

Buenos Aires is covered in smoke.

I am inside my apartment on the 11th floor in Buenos Aires, windows closed. I am breathing in smoke. Why?

Because somebody decided to do an agricultural burn expecting the wind to blow in the opposite direction. It blew towards BA and now you literally can’t escape the smoke.

It’s very strange not even having the /choice/ to leave. This has to be bad for you.

It’s real bad as you get closer north. You can’t see more than a foot in front of you. At least in mist you can breathe. I’d take a picture but I would need to open a window.

I think it’s getting worse. It looks hazy INSIDE. This is very bad for you.

I took a picture outside and I felt like a hurricane photographer or something. Being somewhere you are not supposed to be. At least a hurricane is “you live or you die” –this just eats away at you.

One particular direction.

Here is one direction we can head in for Anuva’s new look. Its sleek and sexy. I do wonder if it will appeal to everybody, though. The interesting thing about the wine industry is that its demographic has a rift in it between the past generation who has its own views on the internet, and a new generation who is closely linked to the internet.

I only know how internet design appeals to the latter group. Perhaps this type of design, and new generation features such as flash are only appealing to that group. Perhaps a blank white page looks better and more ‘refined’ to the past generation.

Time will tell. I plan to have many different versions to show everybody I know.