Psyked*

it’s easy once you know how.

Six reasons to use ActionScript 3.0

Posted by Mark - 19/08/08 at 10:08:20 am

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/actionscript/articles/six_reasons_as3.html

Essential ActionScript 3 Classes #1

Posted by James - 09/05/08 at 09:05:48 am

BiteArray.org has a little collection of several ActionScript 3 Classes that would feel right at home in your core libraries.  There’s a JPEG encoder, PDF generator, Zip file generator and even a class for gesture recognition, and many more besides.  It’s worth a look.

Trouble migrating to Actionscript 3?

Posted by James - 27/02/08 at 09:02:35 am

Well, a quick Google would find you a plethora of pages, giving you pretty much exactly the same thing - that is, AS2 to AS3 migration guides. A list of function name / class hierachy changes only goes so far, however - nothing seems to deal with the bigger problem - just how much AS3 has changed from the previous iterations.

If it was just as simple as changing function names it’d be easy, but there’s a whole new set of methods for doing things, and often you don’t know what you’re even looking for to help you. Ever heard of getDefinitionByName? Nope, me neither - but it turned out to be the function I was looking for yesterday.

Anyway, by far the best introduction to ActionScript 3 (not just the function name changes) is one I found from Senocular, Getting Started with ActionScript 3 (for Flash).

Syncronising ScrollPane Components in ActionScript 2.

Posted by James - 04/11/07 at 03:11:57 pm

This is perhaps an unusual one - and one I haven’t seen anyone else make much fuss over, so here goes.

Using the standard Version 2 components (Flash MX2004+) I’ve been trying to link the movement of three components together. “No biggie” you’d think. You can after all, set listeners on the .scroll property of the component instance, and then use that to set the .scroll properties of the other instances. Well yes, that’s true - but looking closely at the movement of the ScrollPanes, you can see a slight lag in their movement. A bit of frantic scrolling can throw the whole thing out of place.
Continue reading Syncronising ScrollPane Components in ActionScript 2….

ExternalInterface not working in Firefox?

Posted by James - 20/10/07 at 11:10:39 am

Here’s a wierd one. Let’s say you have a flash navigation - one of those old DHTML style drop-down ones, but done in flash and layered over the top of your page content. You can stick the wmode to transparent and have a transparent background for your flash.

That’s dandy - but in most browsers (ie. firefox) you’ll run into problems interacting with the content underneath your flash movie, particulary hyperlinks. Hyperlinks and form fields just become inaccessible. Setting the wmode might make things transparent, but it doesn’t help the ‘click-through’ aspect of transparency. So, what do you do? The solution I’ve been using is a JavaScript function which resizes the flash movie, activated using ExternalInterface. Continue reading ExternalInterface not working in Firefox?…

“getURL doesn’t work!”

Posted by James - 01/10/07 at 01:10:17 pm

Ever used getURL(); for loading new pages in Flash? That’s how you load a new page. Obvious, huh?

In 97% of situations it works fine. The other 3% it doesn’t* I’ve had a rough ride with getURL unexplicably not functioning. Turns out that it works if you omit target parameter of the function call, it works. Remember that next time you get stuck…

* Please note, statistics are made up on the spot.

ActionScript: getURL vs. ExternalInterface - When & Why

Posted by James - 23/09/07 at 10:09:31 am

This post all stems from a project I’ve been working on very recently, making a drop-down menu in flash, that sits in a HTML page. What we’re talking in relation to here is, getting flash to execute JavaScript DOM functions.

Now, there are couple of ways for Flash to interact with its host page. The first one that springs to mind is getURL(), the same function that enables flash to load webpages. The second requires a little more preparation, and is ExternalInterface.call(). Both have an upside and both a downside. One’s old-school and one’s new-school. There are however, real reasons why you should use one instead of the other in different situations. Continue reading ActionScript: getURL vs. ExternalInterface - When & Why…