Called To Serve For 2 Years!

I opened up my mission call last night! I’m going to the Kennewick Washington Mission! I report to the MTC Jan. 26, 2005. I will be serving for 2 years teaching in english for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints! After waiting long enough I’m excited to finally have the opportunity to get out! I’m thankful that all my family and friends could be there to support me when I opened my call! I am humbled to think that I will be a representative of Christ for two years as I teach his gospel to the people in Kennewick. 9 more weeks and I will be out there!

Scripted Motion Tweens Tutorial

Penner Tweens, created by Robert Penner, use built-in Macromedia Flash MX 2004 classes to script tweens. This is the touch of class that adds to any flash application / navigation / presentation. To set it up, you define an ease type, then apply the ease type to a Tween object.

Create a new flash document (File -> New… -> Flash Document)

Double-Click ‘Layer 2’ and label it “A” (for Actions). We will place all actionscript on this layer.

Create a new layer (Insert -> Timeline -> Layer). Double-Click ‘Layer 1’ and label it “mc” (for movieclips).

Draw a box using the Rectangle Tool (hotkey is ‘R’) near the top left of the Stage.

Double-Click on your new box. Now Right-Click on your box and select “Convert to Symbol…”.

In the ‘Name’ field put “m_box”. In the ‘Behavior’ radio button group, select “Movie clip”. Press ‘OK’.

Having your m_box on the stage still selected, in the ‘Properties’ toolbar, where there is a white field that has “” enter “box_mc”. Notice that the instance name on the stage is different than the instance name on the stage. We use the “_mc” naming convention for actionscript hints in our code.

Next, select Frame ‘1’ in the ‘A’ Layer. Open up your actions panel (Window -> Development Panels -> Actions or using hotkey ‘F9’). Copy and paste this code into the ‘Actions’ panel.

var easeType = mx.transitions.easing.Regular.easeOut;
myTween = new mx.transitions.Tween(box_mc, "_y", easeType, 0, 300, 30);

Now you might be asking what this just did. Well lets take an indepth look at the code defintion of the Tween object.
(do not enter this code into your movie):

Tween(myMovie:MovieClip, myProperty:Property, easeType, startValue:Number, endValue:Number, frames(or seconds), secondsSet:Boolean);

myMovie:MovieClip — Targets the Instance of a Movieclip on the stage.
myProperty:Property — Selects the property of the Movieclip on the stage to tween. (I.E. _x, _width, _alpha, etc)
easeType as (Parent.Child) — Your tween definition set up as a variable. SetParent Types (Back, Bounce, Elastic, None, Regular, Strong). Child Types (easeIn, easeOut). (i.e. Bounce.easeOut).
startValue:Number — Starting value of property to tween. For more advanced tweens, try (box_mc._y) to get the current starting Y position of the targeted Movie Clip.
endValue:Number — Starting value of property to tween.
frames(or seconds) — Number of frames to tween over, or number of seconds to tween over.
secondsSet:Boolean — Optional value, defaults to false. When set to true, uses seconds instead of frames to tween over.

Save your document (File -> Save)

Test your movie (Control -> Test Movie or hotkey “Ctr-Enter”)

Your box should go from _y position 0 to 300. Now try out variations of properties and movieclips and tweens.

For smoother framerate, try changing the framerate to 31 fps. To do so, go to Modfiy -> Document… . In the Frame rate input box, type in ’31’. Press ‘OK’. Try your movie again.

To try out my click demo, replace your current code on you “A” Layer with this code:

someListener = new Object();
someListener.onMouseDown = function () {
var easeType = mx.transitions.easing.Elastic.easeOut;
myTweenY = new mx.transitions.Tween(box_mc, "_y", easeType, box_mc._y,_root._ymouse, 60);
myTweenX = new mx.transitions.Tween(box_mc, "_x", easeType, box_mc._x, _root._xmouse, 60);
};
Mouse.addListener(someListener);

For more easing variations, view the folder on your computer >>
..Program Files/Macromedia/Flash MX 2004/en/First Run/Classes/mx/transitions

Try out Rober Penner’s examples at:
Robert Penner’s Easing Demo

I Voted, First Time

Got out to the booth this morning on my way to work. Interesting to see how politics work and how the american society as a whole operates. Being a 19 year old going up to the booth, I was definately in the minority. Wearing my shirt from threadless.com and getting a few strange looks, I signed my name and punched the holes. My vote was equaled with anyone else in the country, including any senator or member of the house.

Can’t believe how much CBS news caught a hold of my attention tonight. Mainly from their amazing touch-screen program that displayed the spendings of each campaign on television ads in each region of every battleground state. The election night is being very well done as far as the functionality and design of the presentation. I’m quite impressed.

The race goes on… Bush is up… lets hope he stays up.

CSS, XHTML, W3C – Getting Started

If you’ve been doing web design for the past few years and just recently learned about web standards, welcome. Let’s get started.

  • What’s CSS
  • XHTML
  • W3C Validation
  • Get Started!

What’s CSS?
What happens when you say to someone, ‘I do web development’? Their answer is, “Yeah, I learned that h… t… m… l…. once.” Well good for them, they know how to make tables… with frontpage. Why am I telling you this? Well because people think that HTML is the design language of them web. Wrong. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets that allows an xhtml page of content to be formatted. CSS is the design language of the web, while HTML or XHTML is the content language of the web.

XHTML
What is XHTML? What is the difference between HTML and XHTML. Web browsers allow web developers to write sloppy html. Just like the english language, HTML has grammar. When HTML is written sloppilly, the browser tries to figure out what the writer was trying to say, and then guesses. Each browser has a different guess which makes the exact same page show up different in each browser. XHTML compliant pages use grammatically correct HTML.

More questions about XHTML? Check out w3.org.

W3C Validation
W3C validation is how XHTML checkts to see if it is strictly compliant. It’s just like taking your English paper to your teacher, and she tells you everything that is wrong with it and what to fix. By checking to make sure your page is W3C compliant, you have officially accepted web standards.

Get Started!
Start using web standards!
Here are some links to get started:

Why Choose CSS

Still debating the fact of whether or not CSS is worthwhile. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets that allows an xhtml page of content to be formatted. An example you say? Check out www.cssvault.com.

Going from pure flash sites to pure CSS sites is quite an overhaul. Taken the fact that Flash is completely ‘on-the-fly’ versus the static nature of css, it will be hard to decide which is better. Conforming to universal standards is always a plus, such as the W3 standards of CSS.

Right now the main plus of CSS is fast, and I mean uber-fast content. Secondly, any browser can view the content. Thirdly, you can proclaim yourself a CSS God when finished (a few years back I claimed myself to be linux god as well…)

Well here goes my live test of CSS in the working world…