Maybe this is a little late for any practical purpose, but since I noticed that people have been landing here looking for examples of how to make “snow” with Flash, I decided to redo my snowfall example from last year. With this, I’m signing off for the Holidays. I hope everybody has a great time with family and friends.
This time I made it from scratch, and you can see a working example in this sort of greeting card I have put in my homepage. In that one, the head of the snowman turns whenever there’s ia change in the wind magnitude, even if the snow is not significantly affected.
The source file for the updated snowfall example is available here.
I live here, I want to feel secure. But does prohibiting artistic expression actually add up to solving such a broad and complex problem like transit security?
What’s going on
Let’s not rant too much about this, the issue is very simple: the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), the institution that manages the transit system in New York City is proposing the following amendments to their Code of Conduct:
“1050.9.c. No photograph, film or video recording shall be made or taken on or in any conveyance or facility by any person, except members of the press holding valid press identification cards issued by the New York City Police Department or by others duly authorized in writing to engage in such activity by the authority. All photographic activity must be conducted in accordance with the provisions of this Part.
1040.4.f. No photograph, film or video recording shall be made or taken on or in any conveyance or facility by any person, except members of the press holding valid press identification cards issued by the New York City Police Department or by others duly authorized in writing to engage in such activity by SIRTOA or the authority. All photographic activity must be conducted in accordance with the provisions of this Part.”
Such a policy will simply make it impossible for amateur photography and video to access any facilities regulated by the MTA in NYC and Staten Island. These amendments are to be introduced next year, after a 45 day comment period which is already running, and ends on January 10th.
What can we do?
We can email the MTA and let them know our position regarding the ban of still and video cameras from subways and buses, or better yet, write a letter to David Goldenberg, the agent in charge of receiving any concerns regarding this decision. Here is the address:
David Goldenberg
New York City Transit Authority
130 Livingston Street, Room 1207
Brooklyn NY 11201
I’ve been lurking around the forums and mailing lists archives during the weekend, looking for an answer. Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to find any helpful information, and I’m just concluding that it is impossible to use CSS and a mix of embedded and non-embedded typefaces.
I have been using these four examples to explore the behaviors of different HTML strings. What I wanted to accomplish is to display dynamic text from a database, formatted using a Stylesheet using common typefaces, thus eliminating the need for embedded fonts. However, at the end, I needed to embed just one special typeface like in the example above. So, we create a new Font from the Library, and set “Header” as it’s identifier; here goes the code:
// Create StyleSheet
var myCSS = new TextField.StyleSheet();
// Create .header Style
myCSS.setStyle (".header", {fontFamily:"Header", color:"#CC0000", fontSize:"30px", fontWeight:"bold"});
// Set the textfield to embed the typeface
greeting_txt.embedFonts = true;
// Assign StyleSheet to the Textfield
greeting_txt.styleSheet = myCSS;
// Assign the formatted text
greeting_txt.htmlText = "<span class="header">Season's Greetings</span><br>Lorem Ipsum ...";
The result is Example #2, which truncates the text and displays only the header. Now, this is the first time I attempted to use CSS and embedded fonts in a single textfield, but I guess the expected behavior would be being able to display the whole thing without any more work. So, if there’s is a way to show embedded and device fonts in the same Textfield, I haven’t been able to find it, and if it doesn’t exit… well, it should.
So, in order to see the rest of the text I need to embed another font: Arial, which is ubiquitous and will add unnecessary bytes to my swf. So, to accomplish what you see on Example #4, we need to add another Font to the Library, and modify the code a little bit.
// Create StyleSheet
var myCSS = new TextField.StyleSheet();
// Create .header and .subheader Styles
myCSS.setStyle (".header", {fontFamily:"Header", color:"#CC0000", fontSize:"30px", fontWeight:"bold"}); myCSS.setStyle (".subheader", {fontFamily:"ArialNormal", color:"#000000", fontSize:"12pt"});
// Set the textfield to embed the typeface
greeting_txt.embedFonts = true;
// Assign StyleSheet to the Textfield
greeting_txt.styleSheet = myCSS;
// Assign the formatted text greeting_txt.htmlText = "<span class="header">Season's Greetings</span><br><span class="subheader">Lorem Ipsum ...</span>";
The way these numbers look, the possibility of a technological apocalypse or the “rise of the machines” might not be as unrealistic as one may think
Seriously though, this is a clear picture of what our current focus is. As suggested by John Maeda, on a side note to the preface of his “Creative Code”, “we all have to work a little harder”. There, he presents comparative data from 2001 to 2003, regarding the number of results yielded by Google when searching for the words “human” and “computer“. I just augmented the information with the most current results, and completed the graphic, which gives us a better look at the trend.
