I love retro design and I was inspired by this example from Celebration Of Vintage and Retro Design by Smashing Magazine. I figured it’d be easy to make programatically, and I call the effect a “thoven”:

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Instructions: Write the romanization of the phrase above (I got the romanization from here). When you press enter you’ll move on to the next entry if your answer is correct. If you need help click the hint button.

Bugs: I’m aware of two bugs right now - the blinking cursor doesn’t appear for some reason, and sometimes you’ll get “undefined.” Just refresh the page if you get that error.

I wrote this trainer application because, while I can recognize the symbols by themselves, I’m having problems recognizing hiragana in words. Don’t expect the words to make sense, all this does is put together 5 kana together at random.

Hopefully this is useful for others as well. I’ll be updating this as time goes by, and the code can easily be made into a trainer for katakana. The next step is to start building a word database so that it can be a vocabulary trainer as well.

I’m posting the source files as well. If you make any improvements, please let me know. Please excuse the messy code, I rushed this.

Source Files:
Flash: Here
XML: Here

Full-screen flash has been available with projector files and the stand alone flash player for a long time. What’s exciting here is that this is now possible to with the browser plugin. You can check it out by clicking on the little monitor button on my header. If you can’t see it, you might need to clear your cache.

It turns out that this very easy to do. First, you need to pass the parameter “allowFullScreen” set to true to flash on your object and embed tags. My HTML looks like this:

<object classid=”clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000″ codebase=”http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,29,0″ width=”100%” height=”200″>
<param name=”movie” value=”/assets/headers/flashHeader.swf” />
<param name=”quality” value=”high” />
<param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true” />
<embed src=”/assets/headers/flashHeader.swf” allowFullScreen=”true” quality=”high” pluginspage=”http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”100%” height=”200″></embed>
</object>

In your actionscript , you need to have the code:

Stage[”displayState”] = “fullScreen”;

If you want to be able to write:

Stage.displayState = “fullScreen”;

you have to add the “displayState” property to your Stage class file so that the compiler doesn’t bitch at you.

Full screen will only work if it’s triggered by a mouseClick or a keyPress (it would suck if someone was able to take over your screen just by visiting a site), so you should be ok if you put the code inside on(release) or a keyboard listener.

Of course, video applications will be the first to embrace this. For a good example, try this link: http://www.flashcomguru.com/apps/fullscreen_player9/fullscreen.html

For more information check out the Adobe page: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/full_screen_mode.html