cresk on Flash Aesthetics

the end of thelinkz.com

cresk — Sat, 24 May 2003 15:30:54 GMT

Dear visitors of thelinkz.com,

As you may have noticed a long time ago, thelinkz.com isn't in the state of being absent anymore. The reason is simple: lack of time and trouble with a former ISP.

thelinkz.com was my firstborn child that I tried to keep alive from 1995 until the end of 2002. It all started out as a personal hobby: categorizing and maintaining a list of Flash related sites and keeping track of Flash aesthetics on the web. Not the easiest task to do, but I think I attained success on this frequently due to the enormous amounts of loyal and unique visitors of thelinkz.com on a daily base. A simple bookmark list that became one of the largest Flash related links directories on the web.

It was a great pleasure to maintain and own a list that became fairly large in size and popularity.

As a creative controller and web developer I think it was the right time to trim back some of the activities I absorbed in past periods of time.

I want to thank all visitors of thelinkz.com for their help, submissions, patience and time.

Gert van Duinen (alias: cresk)

www.cresk.nl

nice book

ojej.org — Fri, 16 May 2003 00:19:33 GMT

i like.
flash art design // mario

Online Flash Rich Text Editor

mem — Mon, 28 Apr 2003 05:23:13 GMT

Object Craft (small Australian IT CompanY) has created an online Flash rich text editor. you can check it out at: www.object-craft.com.au

Re: Macromedia back to school

minivip — Thu, 06 Feb 2003 00:46:59 GMT

if you can't beat them join them ;-)

An easy way to create Pixel Fonts

cresk — Fri, 07 Jun 2002 13:19:55 GMT

PixFont 2.0 from Kgroup is a small TrueType Font to TrueType Pixel font converter.

By default used fonts are smoothed by Flash so small fonts are becoming illegible that way. A resolution to this problem is to use pixel fonts.

With PixFont 2.0 you can generate a TrueType Pixel font of the font you want to use in Flash. As a welcome advanced feature, PixFont 2.0 also lets create fonts from bitmaps directly. This means that you can draw your own pixel fonts as well.

Note that PixFont is not a valid Win32 application: at least that's the message I get when trying to launch this tool in Windows 2000 professional!

Don' surf the net... make the waves

cresk — Wed, 05 Jun 2002 00:24:18 GMT

Some odd and common Flash experiments and a plethora of downloadable examples from PeopleForFun Laboratory.

Bokels Common Actionscripts

cresk — Wed, 05 Jun 2002 00:05:54 GMT

Also found a goodie from Bokels. He provides some of his free to use common techniques in actionscript like preloaders, load variables, waiting, mouse followers, animations, javascripts, random, numbers, some miscellaneous, experiments and a Flash 5 language file for Beautifier to download.

A couple of nice tiny tuts

cresk — Tue, 04 Jun 2002 23:26:09 GMT

Found some nice and tiny tutorials from Gary Fixler today. Some nice tutorials and examples of various categories such as 2d, 3d, convertors, math and protos...

Macromedia back to school

cresk — Mon, 03 Jun 2002 20:54:29 GMT

Macromedia plans to announce a partnership Monday with Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen announced that his consulting firm, Nielsen Norman Group, will work with Macromedia to develop guidelines for creating practical, easy-to-use Web applications with Flash MX. Read on ...

Flash MX Upgrade Essentials

cresk — Mon, 03 Jun 2002 09:03:29 GMT

Again, I wrote a short review again for the book: Macromedia Flash MX Upgrade Essentials.

Written by Sham Bhangal
Published by: friends of Ed
ISBN: 1903450764
430 pages

Buy it at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

Macromedia Flash MX Upgrade Essentials is everything you need to know about all the features which make Flash MX worth the upgrade. It's a great effective & efficient guide to Flash MX. Sham Bhangal is a great explainer and he takes you on a power-users' trip through the seriously cool areas of the MX release and uncovers the new features in great depth and detail. The book explains why Flash MX will stand out as a pivotal version and let's you harness the power of Flash MX fast without having to go over old ground.

Because Flash MX has evolved into an application tool, the upgrade essentials is designed to help you get the maximum benefit from Flash MX in the minimum time and discusses what the new enhanced features really mean in the wider Flash MX/web design perspective. Flash MX Upgrade Essentials examines the changes, improvements, shortcuts and complexities, and presents them clearly in rich context.

Assuming that you are quite comfortable and competent with Flash 5, this book gets you up to speed with Flash MX and does the filtering work for you. It uncovers the wealth of new features of Flash MX, such as the new interface, heavily reinforced ActionScript capabilities, enhanced video and multimedia support, accessibility and usability elements, and a formidable object-based programming paradigm that could change the way you think about Flash and ActionScript.

Flash MX Upgrade Essentials offers the most efficient way of getting up to speed with Flash MX and it achieves what its' title suggests.

FlashDevils Community launched

cresk — Mon, 03 Jun 2002 05:47:16 GMT

After three months of hard work they finally launched FlashDevils Community at www.flashdevils.com. To celebrate this they have their first interview with Eric Jordan from 2advanced.

Flash Enabled MM's site of the Day

cresk — Fri, 31 May 2002 09:54:48 GMT

Today the Official Site of Flash Enabled the Book!, developed by Steve Leone of unplug, is Macromedia's site of the day.

"Built fast, built smart, and built for easy updates with Macromedia MX products".

Uh! And better voicing!

snarf3001 — Thu, 30 May 2002 18:08:59 GMT

I love the way Ugly Mean Chickie talks!

Better cars huh?

cresk — Thu, 30 May 2002 15:33:18 GMT

Oh really? That must be quite okay then coz ama Car-addict to the bone since they officially gave me the licence to drive. I guess that's the most stupid thing they ever did, lol.

Joe Cartoon is ok

snarf3001 — Thu, 30 May 2002 13:16:24 GMT

..but check out www.hoving.com for some REALLY nive stuff! He's my unchallenged favorite when it comes to funny flash-cartoons! Hoving's got better cars.

Perspective Retro Look

cresk — Thu, 30 May 2002 12:21:34 GMT

Computer Arts outlines some key elements of creating pixel illustrations in Photoshop. Calling your mind back to early computer game graphics. Creating objects like buildings or cars that involve lots of straight lines and hard edges, as well as outlining how to create organic objects such as a person, or in this case a monster.

A couple of these perspective tricks can be used in Flash MX too. The new Pixel Level Control in Flash MX - the pixel grid when zooming beyond 400% - allows you to easily align bitmaps, crispy strokes and fills with precision to pixel boundaries on stage. I hope to write a short tutorial about the new Flash MX Pixel Level Control as soon as there are some spare decades to spend on this.

Goanna Humpah

cresk — Thu, 30 May 2002 10:28:06 GMT

Sick bastard Joe's humor is my humor, period. So that makes me a sick bastard too huh? Possibly, coz ama big fan and subscriber of joecartoon.com (March 20, 1961, 11:35 a.m.) Hah! Stone Flies and more of his insane stuff all over the place. This stuff is covering some nice portions of my disk space. Can't wait to tell ya, so here it is! A long awaited new bloody Joe piece again. I hope you dig it. Coz Joe's site is most certainly lacking in maturity and has absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever. If you are easily offended, don't even try. You will find Joe's a big drunk naked ass problem.

Im afriad I agree...

snarf3001 — Thu, 30 May 2002 08:37:23 GMT

Damn that delicious machine!

Pixel phun and some more

cresk — Thu, 30 May 2002 01:47:56 GMT

Speaking of pixels. Head over to pixelcatalyst and check out some abstract art as well as artist interviews, winAmp skins or wallpapers. Take a closer look at how the Breed machine works or jump straight to eq8's artpacks community site to grab some artpacks. And ehm, meet Spike. Spike is the robot at Egorush.com: an online paradise for digital art from the hand of pixel master Jens Karlsson from Chapter THREE Emotional Abstracts and Desktop Imperium. The first one is his kickass graphic design portfolio and the latter is the one where you can download some kickass wallpapers for your boring workspace.

Blog time is limited right now. Lots of email to catch up on and I am tired of this thinking-working process I went through today. Parsing the external XML content, generated by JSP, with Flash MX Actionscript. Okay its' fun and challenging but at this point I suppose its' quite a bit questionable that Sam will teach me Flash MX ActionScript in 24 hours , hehe ;)

Yes Pixels

snarf3001 — Wed, 29 May 2002 21:00:49 GMT

No doubt that pixels rule! I wonder : how many pixels are there on the internet? And what does a pixel look like when nobodys looking? And does pixels discriminate each other by color? What color pixels are the majority?

Thanks for the Kudos (part 000)

cresk — Wed, 29 May 2002 11:21:06 GMT

It looks like more Flash friends noticed my existence here at inperiod.com. Thanks to Pnut's Thoughts for mentioning me and a big thanks to the friends at Flazoom.com for linking back and for being a new potential daily reader...

A special thanks goes out to netdiver.net which is designed and operated by Carole Guevin. Netdiver is an excellent new media portal with daily news, news about the new media culture industry, snapshot galleries, portfolios, Flash galleries and so on... She just added thelinkz » to her Portals toolbox. Garole happens to be a respective contact for a long time, and I'm happy to expose more of Netdiver here and at thelinkz ». So again, stay tuned...

Super Pimp Pixel Pleasure (Part 000)

cresk — Tue, 28 May 2002 19:12:49 GMT

As a Flash addict I supposed to be in love with vectors. I don't think so! I love pixels too. In fact, pixels rule. Don't know where am talking about? Funkreich does! Take a look at the art of pixelling explained in a short tutorial and don't forget to visit their flyer museum. A long time before a reasonable version of Flash came out, animated pixels ruled! Pixel Industries picked up the art of animated pixels in a thorough manner.

Yes, I'd like to share a portion of my extensive - still offline - resource of super pimp pixel pleasure. You might expect here more as well. Because I often bite off more than I can chew, so I must share the fruits from the pixel seeds before they are popping all over the place.

So I like to start with the designer's lunch boxes and the visual culture online magazines such as Pixelsurgeon, Australian INFront, Surfstation, Kiiroi, Onyro (alias Ant) and so on ... We understand design is kinky (DiK).

After that, I hope to share more pixel oriented projects like drupedesign, the Baby Factory by Charles Forman from setpixel.com. For know, you have to deal with Golden Shower, Habbo Hotel, Junkbot (Lego Build), macrocity, redmouton and something like the Official Nerd Olympics.

Yeah I know there's indeed some Flash involved and I also forgot to mention an awesome lot. But like I said, stay tuned for more pixel oriented eye catching goodies.

Maya Personal Learning Edition

cresk — Tue, 28 May 2002 17:13:26 GMT

A well known fact for the most computer graphics (CG) artists out there is the Free Maya Personal Learning Edition from Alias | Wavefront (Win/149 Mb, Mac/136 Mb).

Maya is a brilliant renderer. However, for the average amateur computer graphics artist, the price of the award winning Maya Complete software package has always been the greatest bottleneck. Therefore Alias | Wavefront announced the Free Personal Learning Edition of Maya. The only exception, or say requirement, for using the Personal Learning Edition is that you may not produce commercial films such as Final Fantasy and the package may not be used by training centers or academic/educational institutions for instructional purposes.

Pnuts Thoughts

cresk — Tue, 28 May 2002 10:46:38 GMT

PNut from Studiowhiz.com shares his thoughts about Flash, HTML, technology and more whizdom...

the Mind of a Genius

cresk — Mon, 27 May 2002 10:23:32 GMT

The Official Theatrical Web Site for Universal Pictures' A Beautiful Mind made by Design Reactor. Still haven't seen this beauty with Russel Crowe yet.

The site is really a true companion with games, challenges, genius resources, a couple of math tips, definitions of a genius, famous geniuses and some good quotes.

"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men - that is a genius". Ralph Waldo Emerson.