I have spent the last little while working on a lot of Bayer CropScience Flash stuff. Here are links to some of it, with more coming in the near future.

InVigor Microsite:
I did the banner on the home page which creates shows how quickly and problem-free their hybrid seeds grow. This banner was also re-worked to be used in a Google adwords campaign. I also created a standalone video player as well as a video player that toggles between 4 different videos on the "Growers Talk" page.

Infinity Microsite:
The Infinity site is another Microsite that uses a similar video player setup and also has an "FMA" to grab attention towards the product and its features.

Herbicide Resistance:
For the Herbicide Resistance site I created an educational Flash "FMA" that gives a brief overview of "Herbicide Resistance" and a possible solution.

There are a few other items launching soon, so stay tuned!

I recently built a web-site for Ric Kokotovich, it is a portfolio site to showcase this artists amazing work. Some of the images take a while to load but it is worth the wait. They were very insistent on quality for this site even if it meant some sacrifices on load times.

View Site

I created a banner for a site a month or 2 ago and the company decided they wanted to re-work it for their AdWords campaign, so a designer here at work used the class I built to re-build the ad in a bunch of AdWords sizes. All seemed peachy... Then upon uploading the ads our media person was given the error "Encountered flash error - ad cannot have random numbers".

We contacted their customer support via phone and the only reason they could give us was that "it is possible that random numbers can be used maliciously". They would not give us anymore information beyond that. I really do not see how a random number can be used maliciously other than calling a random script, but AdWords already throws an error for calling outside scripts.

I suppose I could generate out a list of random numbers and use them in an array as follows:

 
var _counter:Number = -1;
 
var _random:Array = [
 
0.404158900026232,
 
0.717061429284513,
 
0.776794651523232,
 
0.924381226301193,
 
0.349322804249823,
 
0.271397457458079,
 
0.840603074524552
 
];
 
function randomNumber():Number {
 
 _counter++;
 
 return _random[_counter];
 
}

Theoretically I should be able to just do a find and replace of Math.random() with randomNumber() . It won't be different every time but at least I should be able to maintain the "random" look of how the items are positioned.

A few people have been asking me about AS3 these days, so I thought I would share a couple of resources that really helped(and still are helping) me.

This post on Kirupa has been an amazing resource for the Actionscript 2 to Actionscript 3 migration.
http://www.kirupa.com/forum/showthread.php?t=223798

This AS2 to AS3 migration cheat sheet helps a fair amount as well:
http://actionscriptcheatsheet.com/blog/quick-referencecheatsheet-for-actionscript-20/

The Calgary Flash user group is managed by a fellow developer at Rare Method. It meets on the first Wednesday of every month. The turnout is off and on but it is still a good opportunity to talk to other Flash developers and designers in Calgary. If you would like to find out more information and sign up I would suggest going here.

I've finally found a bit of time to start playing around a bit with the Papervision 3D class set for Flash. It is an awesome set of classes and I applaud the whole team over there. It will take a while for me to learn, and I am still trying to think of something practical I can build to help teach it to myself.

So far the hardest part of it all, is creating COLLADA models to import into it. I did a tiny bit of 3D work using 3D Studio Max while I was at SAIT, but I no longer have access to that program so I am using Blender which is free and very cool but also has a steep learning curve. Most of my experiments so far have just involved using basic primitives like spheres, cubes and cones. Hopefully I'll have some examples to post up here soon!

I built this interactive banner about 6 months ago, it is meant to be a nice little piece of eye candy for the site and was actually pretty fun to make. You can check it out by clicking the image below.

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Over the past year or so I have built a few real estate lot management tools using flash. Here is a list of them.

Hawks Landing : This is perhaps the most in depth lot manager I have made. It is managed through doItLive, an ASP based content management system that allows the client to update all textual details on the map, and most importantly the status for when lots are available, sold, on hold or available through a builder.

Copperfield : This one is a far simpler approach than Hawks Landing but still is effective in displaying necessary details to potential home buyers and developers. It has an overall view of the map with options to move in closer to each phase. This map is also managed through doItLive.

Heritage Hills : Heritage Hills also has an overall view with the ability to move into one of the phases for lot details. It was also built so that it is easy to add detail maps for additional phases as they come available. This particular map is managed via I macro I wrote that exports an XML file from a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet containing all of the lot details. This particular manager also has the ability to highlight lots based on builder.

Forest Crowne (Phase 3 & Phase 5) : The Forest Crowne lot maps are very simple, showing just enough detail to keep potential buyers in the loop about which lots are sold or on hold, as well as showing the general dimensions and shape of the lot. This map is also updated through the ASP CMS doItLive.