Labs

Developed over years, matured through a long process of adding, removing rewriting, refining, curating, forgetting, re-adding, improving, collecting, enhancing, rewriting … hours of hard work by an amazing team. The Big Spaceship package is a collection of useful classes that help us to do our basic daily tasks faster so that we have more time to concentrate on the fun stuff.

Here it is, the public Big Spaceship AS3 Repository on github:
http://github.com/bigspaceship/as3

Adobe Flash is a plugin. A lot of websites don't require it, but there are many that do. The ones that use it have a worthwhile payoff: exceptional user experience. It's not outdated. It has a wide range of capabilities. And it can do more than you think. This article is not in defense of Flash or promoting any particular technology. I'm writing this to clear up the blatant misconceptions that make up the "reasoning" behind some of these arguments against it. If Flash were to "fade away," as some say it will, it has nothing to do with HTML5, Apple, or the iPad.

On a recent PHP project, I was having trouble with the somewhat ridiculous PHP error handling and Alec, a developer here, pointed me to the terminal "tail" command.  This command keeps a persistent connection open to a file and reads the contents into a terminal window.  Using it I was able to tail the php_error_log file, which gave me a full readout of errors regardless of 17 different ways to set PHP error levels. This technique can also be used for debugging Flash content.

Charlie discovered the idea of the super formula. Since it sounded super, Charlie proposed a challenge, a coder challenge, a super coder challenge. The challenge was straightforward – create a super formula editor that creates a super shape. The other parameters being that the shape must spin in 3D (well at least look like it), the shape must be composed of at least 10,000 particles, the shape must be editable and it must be made in Flash. The winner determined by the fastest FPS, as judged by Mr Doobs stats class.

The usual flash sites that we build contain tons of huge graphics, animations, dynamic motion, videos, timeline transitions as well as tons of code, utilizing huge open source libraries like papervision 3d, tweening engines and so on.

We want everyone to be able to use their preferred design/dev environment to ensure a fast way to produce innovative high quality work. That includes using the Flash IDE and still being able to use Flex/Flash Builder as a developer.