Slave to ActionScript
Mnngngn… three nights slaving over a hot monitor and several billion lines of ActionScript (99.9% of them subsequently trashed) are finally paying off.
Ed’s been staying with me, we’ve been building his website together. Had no idea where to start, but Ed described to me a navigation system which sounded like the OS X dock, so that’s what I aimed for.
I downloaded and tried out a couple of ActionScript implementations of the dock, but had problems getting them to work in Flash 8, plus none of them seem quite suited to what I wanted to do. So in the end, I rolled my own.
Starting from scratch, and some pretty scratchy ideas about the algebra governing beautiful motion, I hacked and hacked at a bunch of equations until I had something I liked. Then I accidentally took it a hack too far, and my Flash was demonically possessed. A few exorcisms and a lot of fine-tuning later and I’ve come up with a very nice rolling image display strip. Of course, this is only the first part of the site - there’s still lots more to do (like load in the high res versions of the images, and provide you with a loading bar to reassure you that there will be some images along eventually), but after three nights of struggle it feels like a worthwhile result.
Until the website is finished you can have some scrolling, clicking-good fun with my undulating ovulating flash image bar at theinvisibles.com. Like I said, everything in there has been done by Ed & myself, and absolutely all of the positioning, movement and scaling is done using a rusty spanner and an ActionScript cookbook, no poncey tweens or timelines here matey!