ManMeng's Lifepad

[Works] BudakPantai.com

It’s towards the end of the year, and I’m glad it ends with this interesting project that started of as an experimental ground for the illustrator and for me as well, to play with scripts and performance control in a Flash site using Actionscript 3.0. The site is packed with lots of juice and preferences or settings are controlled through external XML(s).

official site for a singaporean acapella band

You can go to the site now at : http://www.budakpantai.com

While I only take care of the implementation and backend for the site, I’m delighted on how it turned out in the end, performance and aesthetically speaking. What do you think?

Things that I can think of in implementing the comment system :

• Take existing XML guestbook script
• Modify it and revise it to use with Flash
• Flash takes in the chunk of the XML structure from the existing file, holds it to the memory, and if user inputs new data, combine old with new data
• and sends the whole chunk of data as raw POST data
• on the server side, a php file will do the dirty job in saving the POST data as .xml file.

[WIP] OMTracker : Unofficial OneManga.com Desktop RSS tracker

http://www.manmeng.net/fun/omtracker/

Tired of refreshing the Recent Updates page everytime at onemanga.com? Try this widget i’ve churned out in a while back then. See it if you like it.

[Works] Regent Residences Kuala Lumpur

The Regent Residences Kuala Lumpur
One of the recent completed project that I can share with you. Took a bit of head banging here and there due to it’s one of my early AS3 projects so far. Enjoy! Should update this on my portfolio soon with other work for this year. Never realized that it has been almost the end of the year. Wondering how much have I been doing since then.

Update : 18th November 2008

Newer revision has been uploaded to the live site. Feel free to check out the new gallery section

Busting AS3’s Myths

Mythbusters Video Voting Minisite
Another good practice for me to debunk all my questions on AS3 right away. Took quite a while for the power to kick in, but I really felt using best practice in AS3 really does fastens up productivity by a lot.
That is not only applying for myself, but imagining there will be another colleague of yours that might need to change your code in case you are not there, temporarily. Full fledge Tweener class in AS3 is used inside as you can see.

Minimal animation at this point because I’m not sure if it is appropriate to go all crazy with my limited knowledge on AS3. On the other, I noticed error handling are certainly way better and detailed than AS2/AS1 counterparts, though it might be a serious pain in the ass when the compiler keeps bitching on missing or unknown objects.

What other benefits I have learnt from there? Loading objects and controlling them are becoming more structural, if it’s a correct word to use, which means sending and receiving data will be more “organized”. Even controlling of video object (flv) is easy, and I can easily retrieve the playheadTime on the fly. But of course one of the biggest myth debunked that, learning AS2 in advance does help you to-know which object to use for an interaction, although the calling method might be entirely different now.

offtopic – have I mentioned I totally enjoyed http://www.thesixtyone.com ?

WESATELLITES.COM

Phew, finally after days of sleepless night. Literally. This thing is born. Full blown AS3-ism. *Pats on my back*

http://www.wesatellites.com

Site mechanics? Was fortunate to play around with the AS3’s computeSpectrum inside. You can see real time visualisation of the song itself. Compiling time was a pain in the ass seriously when you have a lot of bad habit from AS2. You’ll get ton of undefined or unknown error. But for godness sake, I learnt the hard way and noticed there’s a lot of bad habit that I need to shave off. But the real challenge would lie on the full scale video itself. Didn’t really work initially as planned and a lot of stuff needs to be considered for performance when we scale everything up.