Flash

If you're in Vancouver or thereabouts and would like to learn up on Flex, Flash, and AIR, now's your chance! On Thursday there's a free full day of training. They're calling it "RIA Day" and it's happening at the Vancouver Harbour Centre.

I was using the Hurlant AS3 eval library in Flex with no problems but when I tried to use it in Flash I couldn't get it to compile. After prodding the internet a bit more I've found a way to get eval for AS3 working in Flash!

Ages ago I did a quick comparison of some Actionscript documentation generators and found good tools but nothing that fit my needs perfectly. Finally, the search is over.

In Actionscript 3.0 the getBounds() method will include invisible display objects in its calculations. I had a situation where I didn't want this and frankly, was a bit surprised that invisible objects were included in the calculation at all.

Solution source code after the break.

The Flash security sandbox has been around for a while so you'd think we'd seen all the errors. When firefox started reporting an "error calling method on NPObject," I was surprised to find Google didn't drop the answer at my feet. No, this took a bit more exploring to figure out.

When processing large amounts of data you end up leaving the user with an inactive application or even worse, an prompt asking if they want to stop script execution. I've factored out asynchronous processing into a class which I hope you'll find handy.

You might have seen Flash advertisements or video players where the Flash movie expands beyond its original borders. The basic implementation is a javascript resize but there are a couple ways to go about this, each yielding quite a different effect.

I just did a bit of research on expanding a SWF beyond its original boundaries. You often see video players with a button that lets you expand the size of the player. This article looks at a couple ways to implement this functionality.

This article goes over the basics of implementing custom mouse cursors in ActionScript 3.0 and offers some tips for making it behave in a more professional way.

Custom mouse pointers are pretty easy to implement in ActionScript 3.0 Flash movies. I'll go over the basics first, but if you want to skip to the bits about making it look more professional, be my guest.

An implementation for building multi-column layouts in Flash. The text spans across multiple text fields, each with different dimensions and even font styles. Check out the demo after the jump.

I built a slider component with adjustable lower and upper thresholds. Perfect for selecting time periods or other values that cover a range.