scruffian

Today I stumbled across an interesting feature of flash and CSS3 that I thought might be interesting to someone.

If you have ever done much work embedding flash onto a website you will have come across the wmode parameter. If you set wmode=”transparent” then the swf file you include will behave properly and obey your stacking (z-index) commands.

Today I discovered that this parameter also allows you to apply CSS3 border-radius to a container of a flash movie – if your swf takes the same amount of space as its container, then if you apply a border radius to the container if will also crop the swf.

I couldn’t find that documented anywhere, so I hope it helps someone.

Last friday I went to the full frontal javascript conference, which was really good. One of the speakers was Seb Lee Delisle who showed us some nice animation effects with particles using canvas.

This got me thinking – I thought that same thing could be achieved in CSS, without any javascript, so I gave it ago. This was the best I could do:

http://scruffian.com/css3fun/ [will only work on the latest version of Safari on Snow Leopard].

It’s pretty similar – a few differences, but close enough. The nice thing about this is that it doesn’t use any images or javascript – it’s just pure CSS!

It’s quite amazing what you can achieve with CSS, of course at the moment this is only in bleeding edge browsers, but hopefully this stuff will be standardised. I also made a couple of other interesting variations:

bubbles | planets

This isn’t meant to be aired until next week, but for some reason it’s on 4oD now!

So excited…

The beginning of Fly Bikes Uno BMX film is probably my favourite (non trails!) BMX video of all time, mainly because of the music. For the longest time I have been unable to find out what the music is. I emailed Fly to find out but they didn’t know what it was – only that it was from Sergios’s ipod. I used Shazam which told me that it was “The Decant Session” by Yann Tiersen, but that is only 47 seconds long – not long enough.

Then today I found the rest of the piece. It’s part of the “Goodbye Lenin” soundtrack, by Yann Tiersen but Fly reordered the tracks and I really like their order, so I made a spotify playlist of video:

Fly Bikes – Uno

If this doesn’t want to make you be in a band then I don’t know what will:

Maybe this: