WIP
My team recently started working on the new MTV community site packed with social networking and new media features. The project concept is huge and we hope this time the design will gonna be top notch too.

As you might already know yesterday I released one of the new UI helper classes that we are using in this project – AS3 Scale9 Bitmap letting you create scalable, state aware UI elements from bitmap data. Today I will show you a very simple example how we are using this class in everyday work.

Stylesheet
So this is the stylesheet which I made in Photoshop while testing different design variations for the new MTV community website. Nothing fancy, just some components and sub-components displayed in all possible states (normal, hover, down):

Working Demo
And this is what I was able to achieve using the AS3 Scale9 Bitmap class in less than 30 minutes (including building the selectbox):

As you can see, I was able to make a very dynamic and flexible UI component with very little effort using the new helper class. Go ahead and download a copy, I would be happy to hear how you used it in one of your projects!

AS3 Scale9 Bitmap Documentation
Download Now: AS3 Scale9 Bitmap (5454)

AS3 Scale9 Bitmap is helper class that lets you create scale9 sprites with bitmap data fill – originally this was not possible in Flash 9. The helper class creates a “fake” scale 9 sprite containing 9 shapes that scale according to user-defined scaling matrix. Extremely useful for user interface work (creating buttons, scalable UI elements etc.).

Read Documentation
Download AS3 Scale9 Bitmap (5454)

Demo:

Scale9SimpleStateButton (top left), Scale9SimpleBitmapSprite (top right) and original skin files (bottom row)

This is simply amazing! Be sure to watch the whole thing!

SCINTILLATION from Xavier Chassaing on Vimeo.

I want to share with you something very cool that we uploaded to www.mtvgreece.gr today. The new feature is called MTV Radio and it streams non stop music in stereo right to your browser through a little Flash widget in the sidebar. So far it’s totally ad-free and probably it will continue to be like that for time to come.

Streaming service is brought to you by Akamai so there should be little to none connectivity problems but in case you notice something weird happening with the stream in your location – please leave a shout.

Go check it out!