Sam's Blog

On and off for the last couple of weeks I have been working on a flash effect for a client. The brief was to create 12 or so tentacles which would respond to the movement of the mouse as if it was the wind. After a bit of research I discovered Flade which is a 2D physics simulation library for Flash, I did a number of tests for the client but in the end they decided not to go head with this particular effect but I still like it, it is like one of those executive toys.

Here is one of the tests:

[kml_flashembed movie="/gallery2/d/3184-1/Tentacles.swf" height="240" width="450" /]

EDIT:
I have been asked for the source for this, I didnt find exactly the one I was looking for but inside the following zip file you will find /examples/two boxes/twoboxes.fla, that will give you the general idea of how it is working. I also modified some of the primitive graphics routines to draw a solid black line, you will have to change things to suit your project.

tentacle_wind.zip

I found this flash site full of Open Source resources for flash developers, check it out there are so many flash projects happening it is amazing:

http://www.osflash.org/

I ran into this while looking for a way of accessing a SQL database on a Windows Server from Flash. You can do it with Flash Remoting but that is pretty expensive. I found Fluorine which is an open source implementation of .NET Flash Remoting Gateway but I haven’t got my head around all the jargon yet so I am not sure if it is any good for what I want it for. All I want to do is access the database but unfortunately this server doesn’t have PHP so I have to do things through .NET, and jump through all these Microsoft jargon hoops.

Also found this article which might be what I am looking for but still not to sure, it would help if I had a sample database running on my own machine to fiddle with and learn about it.