Adobe Flash - for developers and designers

All of the blogs i follow concerning flash, actionscript and future web technologies have now looked into AMFPHP so why should`nt I. AMFPHP is a open source implementation of the Actionscript Message Format(AMF). This message format lets you send native types and object to and from a server because the AMF allows for binary serialization. What this means is that you can have a folder on your server with AMF installed, create some PHP-files with your request methods and your server is done. The only thing now is to write a few lines of actionscript to connect to your server and your server interaction is done.

I will be back to write a tutorial on this matter so you hold on… or just go to Lee Brimelow`s second part of his AMFPHP video tutorial. Also check out their site.

Have fun!

Images and flash movies(swf´s) are loaded into flash in a standard way, but when loading more than one image troughout your solution the handeling can be tough to manage in a good way. The standard way in loading resources is by using the Loader class and using the load method with the url as parameter. Here is an example:

var loader:Loader = new Loader();
loader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onComplete);
loader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(ProgressEvent.PROGRESS, progressLoaded);
loader.load(new URLRequest(url));

When I create a movie I allways create a representing class to handle all loading of extenal resourses. The main reason is to not have to add the required Read more »

It has now been released from Adobe that Google and Yahoo! has received functionality from Adobe to search not only on websites, but also on flash content. This is great news for us actionscripters and devigners. The official press release states that the three parties now are working together in order to create searching more efficient. The new functionality will let search engines parse as well as index the flash content.

According to Lee Brimelow, an Adobe evangelist, Google has already started using the functionality and Yahoo! will be on the road shortly. I am really looking forward to see how this affects the use of flash sites around businesses.

Working with flash and writing good application requires very good resources in order to achieve the results your projects demand. In order to achieve these you´ll have to rely on the resources in hand. This book has helped me for some time now and that´s why i´m posting the book.The writers from O´Reilly has also created som code that is possible to download from their site. It´s a library that helps you draw ex. triangles, polygons and others using the Pen class. This is something you´ll have to do your self with the Graphics class, but with this wrapper you can define other values that the actionscript library does not handle.

Since I ordered the book I´ve used it many times, because you allways have to look up some code that you don´t remember how to do. This book is for that purpose. It explaines also the complete construction of the code with description. I´ve allways been relying on good resources when creating flash applications and this book has really helped me a lot and if you also can see your self in the possition of needing guidance, this is the book for you. Good luck!

I previously posted a icon carousel written in as2, but wanted to do the same for as3. Both the AS2 and the AS3 version loaded an XML-file that was parsed to retrieve the content/images that should be viewed. This article explains the files needed with code to get the final result visualized below.

First and foremost we have to create the XML-file that holds the data. We do not need a XSD for this and it´s just rock´n roll. Read more »