All posts tagged with: Actionscript 3

ActionScript 3 EBook

In February of 2009 I wrote to Shawn Rubel of Flasheezy.com inquiring about the possibility of writing tutorials for his site. After a few email exchanges between us, the prospect of writing a series of tutorials turned into the idea to write a short ebook that would serve as a thorough introduction into AS3. The result of that idea came to life today as Flasheezy.com has officially launched Stepping Into ActionScript 3 – The Complete Guide for Easy Migration from AS2 to AS3.

Subclassing Event in AS3

I encountered an error yesterday while I was working on a seemingly simple piece of code. Considering that I should have been able to spot the error right away but didn’t, I figured I would write it down for future reference.

I was using a subclass of Event and I was getting type coercion error every time I forwarded an event to a different listener. Considering the code was nothing new, I was quickly stumped, but it all came down to a very simple mistake.

Working with AMF in ActionScript 3

For anyone not aware, Action Message Format (AMF) is a data transfer format that allows you to make remote service calls with ActionScript. The ability to speak to external servers from within Flash or Flex allows you to develop much richer applications. For instance you could use AMF in conjunction with a CMS to load in dynamic content every time your Flash movie plays. The Slide Show widget that I have previously showcased, makes extensive use of AMF to load in settings for the application (colors, behaviors etc.) as well as the content that will be displayed. In this tutorial I will show you the basics of AMF including how to make calls and handle successful and erroneous results.

Action Script Best Practices

I was recently asked to debug a Flash website that was created for a friend of a colleague. After some discussion, I determined that overall, there wasn’t more than an hour or two worth of work to be done. Unfortunately once I actually got my hands on the .fla file, I realized that the developer [...]

IOErrors And The VideoPlayer Class

Recently we decided to allow custom transcoder profiles into our widgets. Prior to this change, I had simply hardcoded the extensions used for various versions of a single piece of media. I would call for the media’s URL and then append the correct extension to receive the file I was after. Adding in the custom [...]

Applying ColorTransforms && Filters to a MovieClip

Here’s one worth remembering: In ActionScript 3.0 you cannot apply a ColorTransformation and a Filters Array to the same MovieClip. Actually, that’s not entirely true. You can apply both to a MovieClip and you won’t receive any compile or runtime errors but applying the ColorTransform Object will nullify any filters you already have or are [...]

Event.SOUND_COMPLETE

Yesterday I was pulling my hair out over a swf file that refused to throw the Event.SOUND_COMPLETE event when an Mp3 finished playing. I did the usual Google search and I found a few people who had the same problem so I figured I’d share my experience. If you look at examples online they all [...]

VideoPlayer.as

If you look through the Flash CS3 documentation, you’ll come across 3 different ways to handle FLV (Flash Video) files. The first, is an old AS2 favourite, the Video class. This low level video implementation does little more than you’d expect. In fact, in order to stream video, you use a NetStream object in conjunction with the Video class. Alone, it does little more than display an FLV file. The second implementation is the packaged FLVPlayback component. As far as implementation goes, this component is the Cadillac of video handlers. With a built in NetStream object and more events than you’ll ever need, the only drawback to this component is that it is a component. With a 50Kb overhead, and a pre-defined interface, the glorious implementation is overshadowed by the fact that skinning the component is the only way to get a custom look. Even at that, it can come off a skinned component and really, who wants one of those?