Dan Zen Launches HummingBird Menu + New HummingBird Zip

Dan Zen has just launched a new 3D Parallax menu with HummingBird.  The addition of HummingBird took about 10 minutes of development time – mainly to position the HummingBird logo at the bottom right corner.

In doing so and testing in Safari on the Mac – it was discovered that if you go to another window the HummingBird driven holder would disappear.  When you went back to the window it would seem to come back from far away.  This led to a suspicion that the X and Y position of the mouse is set to some large number when the mouse is not in the window.  The HummingBird class and thus the Zip have been updated to account for this.

The use of HummingBird on the menu is quite subtle.  Dan Zen also used HummingBird for his holiday card at http://www.danzen.com/holiday2009/.  Here the effect is greater and indeed forms the essence of the feature.

HummingBird for Flash Launches Making 3D Z Parallax Mouse Movement Easy

HummingBird is a free open source Flash Class that lets you easily make a MovieClip hover as you move your mouse around.  This shows a 3D parallax effect when your clip has nested clips with different z properties set.

HummingBird is available at http://hummingbirdflash.wordpress.com and is part of a series of advanced open source interface classes by inventor Dan Zen called Flash Feathers at http://flashfeathers.wordpress.com. Have a look over the sample CODE and VIDEO.

SETUP

• Make a holder MovieClip on the stage
• Add other MovieClips, TextFields, etc.
• Set their z depth property in the properties pannel
• Increase the scale of your clips if you need to
• Make a new HummingBird object
• Pass the holder clip and movement parameters

That’s it!  The holder clip will float around as you move your mouse. Very handy

FRIENDS AND DONATIONS
Please let us know if you use HummingBird and we will add you to the Friends area at left.  If you use Robin for a commercial venture and would care to donate that would be super!

FEATHERS
HummingBird is one of a selection of open source solutions called Flash Feathers available at http://flashfeathers.wordpress.com.

Dan Zen

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