This blog has been fantastic, thanks to the hard work of Scott Wills, but we’ve closed it down to make way for the new ActiveDen Tumblog. You’ll still receive all the same ActiveDen news, tutorials, and industry happenings, but now it’ll come in shorter, more regular Tumblr posts. If you sign up for your own Tumblr account, you can follow us, reblog us, and “like” your favorite posts – just like on Twitter.
In addition to the new blog format, there’s a new man in charge – Adrian Try. You may know Adrian from AudioTuts, but now he’s taking on the role of scouring the web for the most interesting and most relevant information to you!
We can’t wait to see you over on the new Tumblog!
There’s nothing better than a big family and today the Envato family just got a whole lot bigger. We’re welcoming in two new marketplaces and a brand new Marketplace Manager to take over from Cyan! Read on to learn more!
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It’s hard to believe it’s almost a new decade, and with 2010 just around the corner it’s time to get celebrating the holiday season. There’s plenty happening around the Envato network of sites, read on to find out about it all!
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What’s an “API”? A Pink Igloo? A Pig Itching? Not quite.
The Marketplace’s Application Programming Interface (API) allows the development of applications with access to a range of data from all the marketplaces such as the most popular and latest files. More sensitive data such as your account balance, recent sales, and monthly statements can also be accessed securely using your individual API key!
So what? I’m a designer – why should I be interested in geeky code interface stuff? Well, using the API you can develop apps/sites for your mobile, your desktop, or even your blog. Did I mention you can even design and style your applications however you want? Now that’s pretty cool, right?!
Since the Marketplace API was released about 6 months ago, several authors have jumped in feet first to develop some outstanding contributions for the community.
Let’s see what’s been going on…
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Iamdok has been uploading fantastic files for a while now, but really jumped into the spotlight when he won 2nd in the music template competition with his solo music template. If what he’s done is any indicator of what he’s going to do, the future looks bright!
Here are some highlights from iamdok’s portfolio:
Click here for more featured files and authors.
We have amazing authors regularly uploading outstanding files to ActiveDen. With almost 9,000 files already on ActiveDen at the time of writing, it’s important to not only make your items stand out amongst the competition, but it’s also important to make yourself stand out amongst the crowd. Why not check to see if you’re doing everything you can to maximize your opportunities to make profit, contribute to the marketplace in a positive way and lead the way? Here’s our guide to becoming an even more successful ActiveDen author, no matter if you’re a brand-new author, or an author that has been around for years.
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The music template competition was a tough one. It required a lot of hours and even more creativity. The result is a budding music template category filled with fantastic new files. The race for the top three was a close one, but we’ve got our winners. Congrats everyone! (more…)
It’s time for another round-up of Flash-related news from around the globe in another edition of News Flash!
When to Flash and when to Flex
Derrick Grigg asks the question “When to Flash and when to Flex?”, citing a perfect example of a company that developed a promotion entirely in Flex whereas Flash would have been the more obvious choice. Read more
Creating a Flash Facebook Application with the Facebook AS API
Self-professed Italian geek and programmer Emanuele Feronato provides a useful tutorial on how to create a Flash applicaiton for Facebook using the Facebook ActionScript API. Read more
GTween v2
Grant Skinner has announced the release of GTween v2. It’s a total rewrite of the GTween library focusing on size, speed, extensibility, and improving the readability of the code. Skinner declares that that the core library is “now just 3.5kb, and it’s 2-5X faster than beta 5 was.” Read more
ActionScript 3 Performance Optimization
Prompted by some of the work from Grant Skinner (in particular his FOTB 2009 session) and Thibault Imbert, Mike Chambers has been doing a lot of research lately into optimizing ActionScript 3 content. Not just how to make it run faster, but how to approach the process of optimization. Read more
Hype Update
We featured Joshua Davis’ HYPE Framework back in September on the ActiveDen blog, and today saw the release of a new, updated version. HYPE is a creative coding framework built on top of ActionScript 3. A major goal of HYPE is to allow newcomers to Flash and ActionScript to creatively play and express themselves while they are learning how to program. Read more
Sorenson Media Launches Sorenson Squeeze 6
Squeeze, the professional Flash video encoding leader since 2001 is now even better. Features a new, streamlined interface with notifications, automated review and approval workflow & automatic syndication and publishing options. Sorenson are also claiming performance speeds of up to 5x faster. Read more
The 20 Best Internet Flash Games
British newspaper The Telegraph have compiled a list of what they feel are the top 20 Flash games on the Web. I’m not sure they tried very hard with their list, but there are a couple of nuggets in there. 
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The Stardust Particle Engine allows Flash developers to quickly create particle effects using an ActionScript 3 API. Particle effects such as smoke, water, fire and starfields can all be created efficiently and effectively using Stardust.
Developed by Allen Chou and released under an MIT license, this engine will allow you to create both 2D and 3D particles systems. Here are just some of the awesome features of StarDust:
- Easy to extend for custom initializers, actions, fields, deflectors, clocks, and 2D/3D renderers.
- Includes 3D extensions for ZedBox, Papervision3D, and ND3D.
- Includes a native 3D renderer.
- Supports masking (particles can be masked out for actions).
- Supports gravity and deflector simulation.
- Supports action triggers (for creating complex particle behaviors).
- Supports XML serialization.
Examples
See for yourself how effective StarDust is by clicking on the examples below to see what can be achieved:
More Information
For full details and to download and start using StarDust, check out the official project home page on Google Code. We’d love to hear from you in the comments to this post if you have previously used StarDust or think that you might use it in a future ActiveDen submission!
It took a little while before I fully understood the concept and value of collections as a buyer and as an author. They’re there to help buyers more easily find what they’re looking for and couldn’t find using the search bar. They can also be used to drive traffic to your files.
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