Ayarane Project

An update to my portal widget…

Now with sphere buttons!
Fun fact: they use the menu sound effects from .hack//GU. I wanted to use the ones from Tales of the Abyss but seeing as I misplaced my capture box… >_>;

Thing is, I’ve no idea WTF to put in that big open space. RSS widget is out for now. If LogMeIn hadn’t yanked the Hamachi status widgets, I would TOTALLY be using those (along with sprited versions of Blastoise/Dinah/Yggdrasil).
I may as well just put in a giant coin block that does nothing but make the Mario-brand coin sound on click! Kinda like how Staples has that freaking Easy Button. :P

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In other news, Yggdrasil’s mobo and CPU arrived today. I’d have assembled him earlier but I was so wrapped up in coding this damned portal… and I’d rather do it during the day when I have more light. So, tomorrow, old man gets cracked open again and I go for glory! (And hopefully figure out WTF to do about the portal.)

Aah, I’m cold. Hello, 55F on the weather widget!
But, cold weather is nice… one can wrap up in a thick blanket. (Snuggie? Hell no. Might as well get a freaking Jedi cloak.)
…or… I could use Kestine as a blanket… that cat sure likes to lie on me. :3

Yeah, I’m late in cutting new wallpapers/HD versions of individual Avatars… because I got caught up in working on this:

That’s not wallpaper.
That is what happens when I twist arms in Flash. And it’s not even done yet.
Looping video background (made in ParticleIllusion), real-time ticking clock… the floating AP sphere in Yggdrasil’s hand really does launch AP in a new tab when clicked. Also has looping music, too. Much of this is ActionScript 3-powered (and believe me, AS3 is a pain in the ass and looks really scary at first).
I’ve a bunch of other spheres for things like Twitter, FB, CoH Forums, Papa Johns, etc. that I’ma see if I can have float around Iggy’s hand– if I can make this AS3-powered carousel script cooperate, that would be awesome, but otherwise there’s the significantly-messier movieclip workaround.
It’s a pity that Hamachi yanked their online status service, otherwise I would include that too.
Pretty sure, though, that I can rig something that can pull up RSS, and even ping the AP mail server for a tally of new messages… o_o

I won’t lie, the thing DOES reek of the Metroid Prime file select menu, and probably intentionally so because I really liked how that one looked.

So, what the smoo is all of THAT for?
Part of my grand plot to customize and pretty up Altima Network (my house LAN) entails replacing the start page on all my machines is the construction of a Flash-powered launcher-portal-thingy… mostly to one-up neophoenixte‘s portal, but also to make me recall as much Flash/ActionScript as possible for future stuff.

Don’t get any ideas, by the way. In the capacity of as an animation tool, Flash (or rather, vector animation in general) and I will never EVER get along. It’s just not going to happen. If/when you get any animation out of me, it’ll be through a hybrid approach– drawn frame-by-frame in Painter and pieced together in Premiere and what-have-you.

But dominating Flash for things like interfaces and widgets? I could do that. While the end result of this portal widget won’t be public (not because there’s super-secret stuff in it, but more like it’s irrelevant to most of the internets), well… let’s just say that some aspects of it could be easily transplanted into Ayarane Project and its subsystems. >:)