Alex Brooke

（日本語）Last Friday I hung out with some cool cats including members from Spark, a Tokyo based Flash developers group. We met at Nha Viet Nam, an awesome Vietnamese restaurant in Ebisu. Good food and the Saigon beer was pretty delicious.

Mariroom and the other members has expressed an interest in studying English.

Since conflicting schedules would make it difficult to teach everyone on a regular basis I wanted to discuss how we could make an interesting online English studying project. Various ideas included English texts with hidden Japanese translations with comprehension questions. Obviously audio could be embedded into Flash files for people to practice listening and pronunciation. Other ideas included studying English lyrics from songs, internet slang, news, writing emails, cultural differences and humor.

There was a wide range of ideas and subjects people wanted to study. Therefore I think the next step is to created a framework and basic presentation template for all this information.

One idea I had was to make a bilingual site for both students of English and Japanese. So if you are Japanese, you click on a “study English” button and visa versa for students of Japanese. This way, you could greatly increase the amount of users with the same amount of content. You could also make a community with language and cultural exchanges.

I’ll have to get to the drawing board soon. A big thank you to everyone who turned up. It was good to hear you ideas and I had a great time. See you soon!

金曜日にSparkという東京にあるFlash開発のグループメンバーと一緒に飲み会した。Nha Viet Nam というすごくいいレストランに行って、食べ物がおいしくてSaigonビールもおいしかった。Mariroomやほかのメンバーが英語を勉強したがっていたので、どうやって勉強すればいいか話し合った。

皆さんのスケジュールは忙しいから普通のクラスだけじゃなくてオンライン英語講座も作ろうという話した。英文読解したり英語のMP3を聞いたり俗語を勉強したりなどのいいアイデアがでた。かなり幅広い話題だからこれから皆のアイデアを使っていい英語講座のプランを作りたい。

Flashを生かして英和ー和英勉強するためのサイトを作ろうというアイデアがある。英語も日本語も勉強できるサイトを作ると教え合うコミュニティを作ることもできるかなと思った。これから頑張るぞ！

来てくれたみなさんありがとうございました！いいアイデアもありがとう。とても楽しい時間を過ごすことができた。また今度！

iPhone Review Feature

Ouch, we got a really crappy review on Learn Japanese Pod which is good because I’m sure the controversy will drive up site hits. But on a more serious note, it’s good to know that the iPhone has that feature. So you can not only review apps but also podcasts too. I’m hoping more people will send us iPhone reviews. If you have an iPhone and could help out teaching other people who to write one, please contact me by leaving a comment on this post or emailing me at mail(at)alexbrooke(dot)com.

I actually bought a book on how to program the iPhone with the misguided idea I would ever get around to using it. Luckily it is now in the trusty hands of Karamoon, a mover and shaker in the Tokyo tech world. I’m sure he can do something more contructive with it.

Flash Tutorials for Beginners

Which links rather badly into the next topic which is Flash tutorials. I am slowly writing Flash tutorials for beginners in an effort to teach myself and consolidate my knowledge. My angle is that although there are a lot of excellent resources out there for learning Flash/Actionscript, a lot of them tend to assume prior knowledge or miss things out. So I want to keep making these tutorials for beginners and that’s where I need your help. What tutorials would you like me to post? Please leave a comment or mail me. Ta!

Guitar Tutorials

As I am a guitarist and musician at heart, I want to do some guitar tutorials aimed at first for beginners. I may put some more advanced lessons up in the future.  So I need your help. What would you like to learn? What kind of format would you like the lessons? Video? Tab? Text? Audio? I would greatly appreciate your comments and ideas on this so I can make some awesome guitar tutorials for you. Again, please leave a comment at the end of this post or email me. Keep rocking!

This is a tutorial on how to make a very simple AS3 (CS4) preloader for your Flash movies. This tutorial assumes you are a beginner at Flash.

1) Create a new flash document and  a draw rectangle on the stage. This will be our preloader bar.

2) Select it, then click Modify in the top menu and then Convert to symbol

3) Give it any name you like and make sure that the Type is selected to Movie Clip. Also make sure you select the middle left box on the registration point as we want it to expand from left to right. Click OK to save.

click to enlarge

4) Underneath the preloader bar you just drew, insert a dynamic text field.

5) Give the preloader bar an instance name of “loaderBar” and give the text field an instance name of “loaderText”

6) Make a new layer above the current one and label it “actionscript”. You can also give the bottom layer a name such as “bar” if you want.

Click on the first frame of the actionscript layer and open the actions window. (Click Window and then Actions in the top menu)

7) Insert the following code:

stop();
import flash.display.*;
this.stop();
this.loaderInfo.addEventListener (ProgressEvent.PROGRESS, PRELOADER);
function PRELOADER(event:ProgressEvent):void {
var percent:Number=event.bytesLoaded/event.bytesTotal*100;
loaderBar.scaleX=pcent/100;
loaderText.text=int(percent)+”%”;
if(percent==100){
this.gotoAndStop(2);
}
}

Make a new blank frame at frame two of the layer with the preloader bar you drew and import a picture so we have something to load.

9) Click Control and then Test Movie and… it won’t work properly. As you are loading this file from your computer, it will load instantaneously. We need to slow down the load rate for us to check it works.

10) Click on View in the top menu and then Simulate download. You should now see your preloader bar slowly expand with the progress in a percentage underneath. If you are still having problems you can adjust the download simulation rate in View and then Download settings

Download the example file here

NOTES

If you have an animation that plays from frame 2 onwards you can change the line “this.gotoAndStop(2);” to “this.gotoAndPlay(2);”

Please leave your questions, comments and responses to this article. Please let me know of any mistakes, inaccuracies or problems with this tutorial and I’ll try to fix it. Enjoy!

While crusing BackLinkWatch to find out who is linking to my sites, I found a link to my site Learn Japanese Pod at News From South under the title “Other geeks” which made me chuckle.

Not only that, the guy who runs the site is a pro Flash developer. He says “My body lives in Brazil, my mind lives in Japan, and the guitar is my instrument”. That’s very interesting because my body is in Japan, my mind is in Brazil and I play the guitar too.

News From South is a cool site, check it out.

Hello Geeks. Flash geeks to be precise. Today I attended Spark which is a monthly meeting for like minded flash programmers to share, learn and hang out in Tokyo. I was introduced to the group by my good friend Mariroom who is involved with Adobe  Japan and Flash.

The reason I wanted to get the word out about this group is to build some bridges between the Japanese and English speaking communities involved with flash and tech in general. Some of the members are eager to learn English and I’m sure there are plenty of people abroad wondering what some the latest Flash programmers and designers are doing in Tokyo these days.

I believe Colin Moock did a skype conference with the Spark members before I turned up. If you don’t know who he is, he’s like the Darth Vader of Flash Programming. I mean that in a nice way.

Check out their main site here: SPARK

Hopefully I’ll be hanging out with some of those guys and gals again and seeing if we can’t come up with some interesting projects perhaps involving flash and some kind of language exchange.

After the meeting, I got back on my Specialized Rockhopper and somehow cycled home without getting killed on the crazy roads and sidewalks of Tokyo…

This is the first of some very elementary Flash tutorials I will be posting here. This is an exercise in keeping all the cool flash code I have learned in one easy place for me and hopefully to help others. So here is some code I use to embed flash files in HTML pages:

<object width="275" height="200">
<param name="movie" value="yourfile.swf">
<embed src="yourfile.swf" width="275" height="200">
</embed>
</object>

And that’s pretty much it.

This video was taken on my roof in Shibuya looking north east towards Shinjuku. This is also an experiment using Flash to see if I can make videos a little more interactive. Recently I’ve been trying to get my head around actionscript. I’ll probably be posting the code I use in my projects as small tutorials so I can consolidate what I have learned and keep all the useful stuff in one place. Hope you enjoyed the video.

In today’s episode I managed to corner Jeremy with my digital recorder after a recording session. I should also mention that the producer Ray had previously forced a number of beers on the both of us. The ensuing madness inspired me to animate the golden jewels of rock knowledge that flowed from Jeremy’s lips. Syd Barret, where are you when we need you?