Fish Eye Menu in ActionScript 2.0

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Fish Eye Menu in ActionScript 2.0

Posted by James - 12/10/08 at 02:10:05 pm

A little while ago we had to do a Fish Eye menu – the magnification effect you see on the Mac OSX dock menu – but we had to do it in ActionScript 2.0, rather than ActionScript 3.0.

Now, Shine Draw have been kind enough to put a version of this out into the wild, but it’s in AS3 [link]. Of course AS3 is faster and nicer, but there are still some out there who want their stuff targetted for Flash Player 8 – which means AS1 or AS2 only – so I backwards converted Shine Draw’s lovely class-based demo to a timeline-scripted AS2 version.

Demo

Download: Fish Eye Menu [Flash CS3, Flash Player 8, AS3, 110KB]

The process;

Actually, it wasn’t too hard to backwards convert the AS3 version – the three main things to do are to

Take the code out of a document class structure, and onto the timeline – which in reality is mostly a copy and paste job, a bit of commenting out, and changing the events or function calls that initalise the code.
Change variables and parameters, linkages and library classes; .scaleX to ._xscale, event names and listener arrangements, and library item classes.
Rewrite code dealing with depths or the display list. – This is actually the most difficult part of the conversion, and really highlights how difficult depths were to work with, pre AS3.

There’s a little bit of code commenting in there, but if you’re interested in seeing how the two compare, I would suggest you head over to Shine Draw, download the AS3 version, download this version, and look at them side-by-side.

Resources;

Shine Draw – Flash and Silverlight: Fish Eye Menu
(yes, there’s a Silverlight equivilent!)

Posted by James Ford

Full profile: http://www.psyked.co.uk/about

About the author: James is a Senior New Media Developer at MMT Digital, and has BA(Hons) in Design for Interactive Media from the University of Gloucestershire. He loves designing and producing all sorts of website and Flash-related things, as well as prattling on about technologies. Day-to-day he works with Flash, Dreamweaver, Director, Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 (MOSS) and in his spare time he mucks about in Flex and Wordpress. Follow James on Twitter.

October 12, 2008 | In Flash | 2 Comments

2 Comments »

Hi.
I’m David, from Portugal, and I’m nearly finishing my Design of Communication and Multimedia course, at ETIC.

I’m currently working on my portfolio website, and I decided to use a fisheye menu on the galleries, as a way to display the images’ thumbnails.
I found your AS2 version of the fisheye menu I had found before, but in AS3 (which is completely out of my league). I made a few changes just to make icons a bit smaller and closer, and to place it on the left of the movieclip.

But then I ran into 2 problems.

1- How do I make it so the mouse movement only affects the thumbnails (making the fisheye effect) when the mouse is over it?
I was trying to make a condition to say that it will only work when the “xmouse” is over 440 – so it’s in the area where the fisheye menu is placed (my movieclip dimensions are 560 x 450 px), but I can’t get the code right!

2- I’m trying to make the thumbnails into buttons. So I got them to the stage, opened them, and turned the bitmaps inside the movieclips into buttons.
I got the “down” stage to work, replacing the image I use as “normal” with another that I created to be that “down” stage, and it works. It recognizes the button and it’s “down” stage when I press it, but now I’m trying to make the buttons to work “onPress”, using labels (a simple flash gallery).
I used the simple code:

stop();
b1.onPress = function (){
gotoAndStop(“photo1″);
};
b2.onPress = function (){
gotoAndStop(“photo2″);
};
b3.onPress = function (){
gotoAndStop(“photo3″);
};
b4.onPress = function (){
gotoAndStop(“photo4″);
};

But it doesn’t work! It wont go to the other labels.
Can you tell me what I’m doing wrong?!

Stay cool!
Peace ;p

Comment by David — 4 February 2009 #
This rocks, thanks!

Comment by Lars — 21 June 2009 #