Being a showcase for the Flash work of Untold Entertainment, the image slider is used as the main focus of the home page and displays his latest projects. Continuing from the first two tutorials, I’ll now show you how to create this slider with jQuery.
We’ll be treating the slider as a separate element from our Twitter bar before, so no need to use old code here.
With the abundance of jQuery image gallery plugins and scripts it’s safe to say that jQuery makes this sort of thing in particular run a lot more smoothly than with plain JavaScript. This section will be the easiest part of the series.
Let’s dive in. Read more »
Carrying on from the first part of creating a Flash-less home page on Untold Entertainment, we add to the tutorial on animating Twitter text with some more usability and style.
We start off by generating links (to URLs and Twitter pages) inside the text, make a couple of buttons to skip the tweets backwards and forwards, then animate the Twitter bird and speech bubble as a background. Read more »
Ryan Creighton’s Flash development site Untold Entertainment has a quirky home page with plenty of animation and things to click on (complete with roll-out tongue) and of course is built in Flash. Thing is, I’m against any kind of Flash interface. It’s great for games, but otherwise it’s unnecessary (which includes videos).
With the whole Adobe v Apple debate that’s going on right now (yes, I said I wouldn’t mention it but it applies here ‘kay), it’s safe to say you’d be better placing your chips on the JavaScript and HTML5 end of the table.
The discouraging part is that his website could be done without Flash as most of the scrolling and animating could be done with straight JavaScript, and jQuery will help see things along smoothly.
Today I’ll show you how to animate the text at the top, feeding in from his Twitter feed, complete with jerky timings, slanted text and collecting feed data. Read more »
I’m working on a Facebook app that needs to collect images from an external server. Normally I could use a function like copy to do this, but this requires allow_url_fopen to be on and a lot of providers like mine have this turned off to tighten server security.
Eventually I came across file_get_contents to do the job. Since this also needs allow_url_fopen to be on, my post on fetching page content with cURL came to mind.
This does the same thing without restrictions on privacy and is available on most current setups. Read more »
Earlier this week I came across an interesting Tumblr theme by Jarred Bishop. The site played with the background-attachment CSS property to show a unique background for each Tumblr post on his main page (depending on which post image he used) and stays static as you scroll.
I started to play around with some code to replicate this effect and instead came up with some different examples, while still manipulating background-attachment. Hit the jump for some demos. Read more »
Globally Recognised Avatar (or Gravatar) is a service from the WordPress team that allows you to improve your web presence across blogs and specialist websites. It’s one of those “why didn’t I think of that?” products that are so simple but yet have so much opportunity to be integrated into virtually everything. You can see examples of this from the comments below and in my sidebar.
The problem with Gravatars that I find a lot of people mentioning is that they don’t get to see their Gravatar before they post a comment – like the comments section on Shamus Young’s Wavatar post.
You may not think that’s too big of a deal, or perhaps from a marketing point of view that’s your way of driving comments (nasty people), but allowing them to play about with their image in the form will improve their relationship with your site and increase traffic anyway. Saves people deleting and re-commenting just because their Gravatar didn’t show up right too.
So this week I’ve put together a little script that generates these little Gravatars as you type. It’s even got little Wavatar faces on them that change when you make a new address, so you’ll never get bored! Read more »
Collecting a random data set from your database can be useful for all kinds of data driven applications including analytics and “grey areas” in video game outcomes (battles, gambling, etc.).
Here I will discuss the use and methods of randomisation in PHP with data from a MySQL database. Read more »
For those that are unfamiliar with the Twitter API or are looking to quickly fetch tweets from a user’s profile, this class will help.
In PHP, all you do is include the class in your document and construct it with a Twitter username (with some options for extra tweaking). Read more »
Last week I found a post on Crunch Gear, with a video guide on “Spring cleaning your PC“. He came to the realisation that his PC hadn’t been cleaned in a while, and sets about it with a can of compressed air for ten minutes.
Might have been useful taking this approach myself.
As good as it is to clean out all that collective dust (and I highly recommend that you do), that’s not what this article is for.
After the jump, I’ll show you how to clean up the files in your PC, using some very useful programs and tweaks to get rid of the junk that slows it down. Read more »
One thing that is initially overlooked in game design is handling menus and levels within the user interface. However, we know that it’s always going to be, and is, a crucial part to any successful game, as it helps provide the user with an extra level of control and eases general flow. It’s just a case then of finding the code to do it.
This tutorial will cover a simple technique for handling state management with enums or “enumerated types“. If you have used state management or even just enums in C# before, then this will all feel very familiar to you. There are however some very subtle differences between the markup of the two languages. Read more »
Untold Entertain...
Untold Entertain...
Untold Entertain...
Stephen McIntyre
Chris