The Compound Gallery in Oakland, CA has a cool program called ART IN A BOX. It’s an art subscription service featuring Bay Area artists. Each month you receive a new work of fine art by a different artist. Their artist’s work in a variety of mediums (ceramic, printmaking, painting, collage, digital prints, etc.) and most of them live and work in Oakland or San Francisco. You can indicate a preference...

I’m currently making revisions to a product designer I released in November. One of the revisions is to categorize a theme selector. Once I received the new comps from the client, I noticed they snuck in a combo box menu into their revised design. Not your ordinary flash component combo box either, but there very own stylized drop down menu. So, I started out by searching Google and looking for something...

If you read my previous post on the AS3 Lyricsfly API and my last post AS3 YouTube Chromeless API you will know that I’m creating an online Video Karaoke application for fun. FIRST and foremost I must thank Martin Legris for providing the search functionality. Martin has wrapped up the YouTube API including the parsing of its feeds. He’s even gone out of his way to develop a proxy using AMFPHP...

SWEET!, YouTube released an ActionScript 3 API for their Chromeless Player. Previously, we had to rely on wrapper libraries to bridge the gap between the ActionScript 2 chromeless player and our very own AS 3 code, in short…it was painful. Now, its extremely easy to implement your very own YouTube Player. I scripted up a very simple example for you. Well, I should say it’s a bit more involved than...

The fellas over at BleepLaps have released a new and improved DIY analog synthesizer. I’m a fan of Bleep Labs ever since I purchased and built a Thingamakit. The ThingamaKIT is a DIY analog synthesizer that you control in a different way. The amount of light falling on its photocell eyes change the pitch and modulation, allowing to you use it LEDacles, or any changing light source, to created audio madness! It...

The other day I went over to my girlfriend’s brothers house for a family tree trimming. As we sat around drinking wine, streaming Somafm’s Christmas lounge, an actionscript idea popped into my head. As I listened to the unfamiliar music I was concentrating on the lyrics of each song. Now, I know the classics, but they played a few I just had never heard in my entire life. Out of curiosity I went...

Here’s a simple performance monitor you can add to your flash projects. You simply pass in a display object and an optional boolean. The boolean enables the auto start, by default it is set to true. You will notice the implicit setters and getters which gives you a bit of control of the monitor display. You can stop and start the monitor if need be. You will also notice when you hit a memory leak, it...

Pen Pencil Stencil is the studio and workspace of designer Mark Giglio. I came across Mark’s site while I was doing some R&D for my own personal toy ventures. Mark created a line of kokeshi toys which are pretty cool. Kokeshi are traditional Japanese dolls, originally from northern Japan. They are handmade from wood, have a simple trunk and an enlarged head with a few thin, painted lines to define...