Happy April Fools Day

Filed under: Flash, General Info

If you came to the site any other way then www.taterboy.com. Click the link below to see our sad attempt at humor.

April Fools Day Link

Have a fun day and be careful.

Update:

To see the prank, click Read More.
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Technorati Tags: April Fools, AS3, Flash, Funny, Loader

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Photoshop Tips Though the Years

Filed under: Design, Digital Art, Photoshop, Tips

Can you believe Photoshop is almost 20 years old? It was initially distributed as scanner software by a company called BarneyScan in 1988 and Adobe officially released Photoshop 1.0 in 1990. A tear comes to my eye as I think about all we have been through and how much Photoshop has evolved over the years. “Our baby is all grown up! sniff, sniff.” With each new release came new features, some highly anticipated while others I still wonder what they are used for. As an artist though, is it really about the features? The art is created inside you, we use the photoshop as a tool to express our creations to the world. It was just a lot more barebones back then. I guess this is my version of the famous story, “Walking To School Barefooted, Uphill Both Ways”. That’s right, when I was a young man, we didn’t have a Navigator Palette and all those fancy Layer Effects. We still made art, and it was good. So, what if our our monitors only had 8 bit color at 640 x 480 resolution. That’s what it means to be old school! (Not to take anything away from all those really old school individuals who endured 1bit color.)

I started using Photoshop at version 2.5, though I have not adopted all the features that have come out over the years, I have learned a few things. I remember scoffing when Layer Styles appeared in version 6, everything new just seemed to be focused on filters and effects. I can do a perfectly good drop shadow from scratch, I thought; maybe even faster then it took someone to open the Layer Styles palette and enter in their settings. I did come around though and appreciate how all the styles are non destructive and adjustable.
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Technorati Tags: actions, Adobe, background removal, composit, curves, drawing, filters, masking, photoshop, technique, transform

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Flash AS2 Pro Video Player

Filed under: ActionScript 2, Flash, Free Components/Classes, Tips, Video

There are a some really nice video/swf players out there already, here is mine. It was first built in 2005, thus the out-dated design, but has been upgraded with some nice features over the years.

Some of the features include dynamic colors on the LED display that can be easily updated to match a site color scheme. Dynamic video size, AutoLoad, Jpeg placeholder, cookie support, and can run standalone or loaded into your own Flash app.

Another interesting feature is a loading system that tries to figure out the client’s download speed and buffer the correct amount. This works pretty well in most cases but some web servers can be unreliable when it comes to streaming video with a consistent data rate. So buffer times will very with each download.

Included are FLAs to skin the GUI and update the display logos. This is the pro version we were planning on selling, but were too busy with other projects and never got around to it.

Just a heads up, I have another video app that will be released shortly. It is very similar to my Scrollbar class, in that you do not skin it, the code wraps around artwork that you create to control flvs and audio files. That way you can go crazy with the UI design and the layout of each control. It is written in AS2 and will be coming soon, so check back.

Below is a demo and the contents of the included readme.txt file.
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Technorati Tags: AS2, custom, Flash, flv, Loading, player, scrub, swf, Video Player, volume

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