the parameters for the shader

• center for passing in the x and y
• innerRadius and outerRadius for controling the size of the circle
• rotation (0-360) to change the starting angle
• color1, color2, color3, color4 in the format RGBA (1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0 = 0xffffffff)
• ratios an array of color distribution ratio

Play with the filter…
Download Circle Gradient filter & pixel bender source

I implemented a few parameter to control the shader

• center for passing in the x and y
• innerRadius and outerRadius for controling the size of the circle
• rotation (0-360) to change the angle where the red color starts
• ratio (0.0-1.0) for controling the space used for 1 color spectrum, e.g. a value of 0.5 would use 180 degrees for displaying 1 spectrum and you would end up with 2 spectrums in your circle

is it just me or does the circle in the middle seem to rotate slightly … scary … anyway

Play with the filter…
Download Circle Color Spectrum filter & pixel bender source

next up:
AS3 Circle Gradient

Some Examples

http://play.formatlos.de/circlorator/

Pixelbender Source

For those who want to play with the filter a little bit, there you go CirclorateFilter.zip

Examples

Download:

fontcreator.zip

Setup:

• import the zip file via “Import > Existing Projects.. > Select archive file”
• add flash nature: AS3, Flex 3/4 SDK
• run the ant build (don’t forget to select “Run in the same JRE as the workspace” in External Tools > JRE)

Steps:

select class template (you can create an own class template, save it in the template directory und select it here)

select font file (has to be in the assets/fonts directory)

specify a class name for your font class

the name for the font (thats the name you’ll use with TextFormat.font later on)

font weight

font style

mime type, normally ‘application/x-font’ should do the job

specifiy the chars to want to embed

That’s it. Now your font should get generated and afterwards be available in the deploy/fonts directory.

The class doesn’t work for scrolling text at the moment, but feel free to extend the class.

example:


code:

// highlight container
var highlight : Sprite = new Sprite();
addChild(highlight);
 
// create textfield
var textField : TextField = new TextField();
addChild(textField);
 
// apply text style and add text
...
 
// highlight style
var style : IHighlightStyle = new SimpleHighlightStyle(0x00ff00, 0.5);
 
// highlighter
var textHighlighter : TextHighlighter = new TextHighlighter(textField, highlight, style);
textHighlighter.highlight(/far/gi);
textHighlighter.highlight("Duden", false);

files:

version 0.1
TextHighlighter_01.zip

But with a simple workaround you can change the font face, size and color of the bullet points:

And don’t forget to embed the bullet point, it’s character U+2022

Update 25.01.2010

Added an indent property to easily set the left margin of the list. For using other symbols than the bullet, you have to manipulate your font and embed the manipulated character.

Download Source

That’s essentially a problem when dealing with MovieClips with an image sequence on its timeline. After adding the MovieClip to the stage and accessing each frame the complete sequence is in memory and removing it from the stage again doesn’t free any of this memory. Obviously the single frames are getting converted to Shapes with bitmap fill internally, so you don’t have a Bitmap instance for each frame and therefore you can’t dispose the frames after showing the sequence.

Sequence Example (the swf has no preloader, so you’ll probably have to wait a little bit)
Sequence Example Source (9MB, Flash CS3)

The only solution for this problem is to load the sequence as an external swf and call the unload method of your Loader instance when you don’t need the sequence anymore and want to free the memory. Alternatively you could load the single jpg frames individually, create your sequence programmatically and use BitmapData.dispose() afterwards.

...
mask.cacheAsBitmap = true;
container.mask = mask;
container.cacheAsBitmap = true;
...

This works perfectly with a static bitmap mask but if you try to do the same with an animated MovieClip mask, the mask will not work anymore. Apparently the cacheAsBitmap property of the MovieClip is reset on entering a new frame and therefore to get it working you have to set cacheAsBitmap = true in every frame.

...
mask.cacheAsBitmap = true;
container.mask = mask;
container.cacheAsBitmap = true;
 
addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, frameHandler);
 
function frameHandler(event : Event) : void
{
	mask.cacheAsBitmap = true;
}
 
...