The Actionscript Conference Tickets on Sale Now!

The Actionscript Conference which will be held in Singapore with respectative speakers (Lee Brimelow, Peter Elst, Micheal Plank, Stefan Wessels) is one of events that you don’t want to miss if you are based in South East Asia.

Tickets are now on sale for just around 50$. Pretty good deal, cause organisers are nice guys and do it because they love all this AS madness in internet world

MouseControl AS2 class update - added Mac mouse wheel and scrolling area support

In my previous release of this class MouseControl class - easy adding of mouse scroll wheel capability to Flash (AS2.0)
.
This release is bringing some nice additions,
like possibility of adding a Rectangle area that if mousewheel is used there trigger an assigned function…
example:
mouseControl.addScrollArea(”rect”, new Rectangle(100, 100, 100, 200), Delegate.create($class, traceRect));
where “rect” is id of scrollArea - used for removing a scroll area
second is rectangle parametar for scroll area
third is a function to call on mouse wheel

whole class is now relying on MacMouseWheel class from pixelbreaker

Download the source
Try the example

Flashforward Festival voting is on …

http://www.flashforwardconference.com/finalists

I will surely have an overview of categories like last time…
http://mrsteel.wordpress.com/?s=flashforward

I see some of very cool stuff there, and list seem better then last time but some choices are discutable…

Adobe / Google / Yahoo : SWF dynamic content indexed by search engines

Until now static content in SWF files (Flash Player file format) was indexed to some point by search engines like Google and Yahoo. Any dynamic content was not even close to be read by search engine, and developers worked with alternative content. Alternative content is content displayed in HTML page behind the Flash file, which containts infomation equal or similar to ones current flash page is displaying. Problem was that alternative content coudn’t be set dynamically and read by search engines as Flash file change it’s content without reloading.

Great news is, Adobe has came out with Flash Player which will be used by search engines, for now Google and Yahoo which enables them to get all content from Flash, going through it and retrieving the dynamically loaded content… You can read more at Adobe Developer Center

I think this doesn’t mean Google and Yahoo would be able to link to your dynamic pages directly, because there is no fake clicking capability in current Flash player, or time skip functionality. Something like that may be an option but for now I don’t think Google or Yahoo can lead  directly to your dynamic page inside SWF but they can be aware of your content and show it in search results.

This is surely a great news, with deep linking already enabled on your site this will work like a charm surely.
Thanks Adobe… And please keep this good news coming every month!

Simple Flash Example - Menu with library items and little bit actionscript

I did some simple example for beginners in Flash.
It is an example of a menu, standard looking but interesting. This example involves a little bit of core Actionscript skills, and it’s a more designer concept of programming in Flash.

SWF
FLA

menuItem library symbol contains a menu button
menu library symbol contains menu with menu items and actionscript code

Adobe Developer Center article - Security changes in Flash Player 9

Some things got hype in community, some things don’t get enough attention. Flash Player 9 Security Changes are very very important to notice, because there are lot of changes and they are very good one. From Flash Player 9,0,115,0 version policy files get better use, introducing socket policy file, meta policies and so on… It needs to be read carefully for full understanding, nothing to complicated but if you don’t implement needed changes some clients with newest Flash Player versions may find your site or application not working.

Take a look at Flash Player Article - Security changes in Flash Player 9 by Deneb Meketa

MouseControl class - easy adding of mouse scroll wheel capability to Flash (AS2.0)

UPDATED VERSION CAN BE FOUND HERE :

http://mrsteel.wordpress.com/2008/07/31/mousecontrol-as2-class-update-added-mac-mouse-wheel-and-scrolling-area-support/

MouseControl class
for now just takes care of Mouse scroll wheel capability in Flash
MouseControl is Singleton class which lets you define movieclips and functions that should be invoked if user uses mouse scroll wheel over defined movie clip
it helps very much in situation when you need to define scrolling functionality in different classes of your Flash site or application

• command addScroll(id, mc, function)
  example:
  MouseControl.getInstance().addScroll(”area1″, area1, Delegate.create(_root, moveFirst));

• removeScroll(id)
  example:
  MouseControl.getInstance().removeScroll(”area1″);

example SWF : http://hagane.us/as/mousescroll/mousescroll.swf

source ZIP : http://hagane.us/as/mousescroll/MouseScroll.zip

I just also want to suggest that this is not correctly written Singleton class. Singleton classes should throw arror on attemp of basic class creation like:

var mouseControl = new MouseControl() ;

but mine is doing nothing, it is expecting that you use it correctly and that when you want to use class always use internal class instance (basic of Singleton), getting it with standard

var mouseControl = MouseControl.getInstance()

or with commands

MouseControl.getInstance().addScroll(id, mc, func)

avoiding doing proper Singleton is basiclly of AS2 which is not so strong typed language …
In AS3 I recommend you do proper Singleton - nice guide you can find on Grant Skinners blog

gskinner experiment on branch tree

Excellent stuff is always coming from mr Grant Skinner. He is one of the best Flash developers out there, always pushing limits and handing out something interesting.

Branching tree experiment is kind of experiment that many people tries to do perfectly, trying out to push the limits to the realistical looks. Grant Skinner did it amazingly and expectedly great. Check out his Elm Tree Branching Experiment 
There you can find links to his previous experiments in branching, circular and previous tree branching in as2, check them out too.
Respect for gskinner!

Simple accordion example in Flash 8 (Actionscript 2)

I made this really simple example of accordion usage replying to one forum question.
Nothing special to see, but good for beginners just to get simple things going and get more interested in Flash.

Beginners can play arround with symbols star,circle and square and their icons, also you can use few new AS lines to add more childes to accordition. Create new symbols for new childes, give them proper names and don’t forget to put export for AS and export in first frame in properties of movieclip (right click on symbol in library and choose Properties option) … Also don’t forget to use help on any topic in Flash, even if you think you know it good there are lot of usefull information and you can find some methods that are really interesting.

http://www.hagane.us/as/accordion/accordion.swf
http://www.hagane.us/as/accordion/accordion.fla

Flash image gallery example (Actionscript 2) - using PHP to list images from folder

this is simple gallery example for AS2
gallery is nothing special, ease to use and implement

interesting thing about this example is that you pass a folder, and PHP side gathers image list from a folder and returns it to the Flash in XML form together with images widths and height which makes it more easier to implement this sort of galleries like I’ve made

so from this example you can see :

• PHP serving XML to Flash
• PHP getting image size (width and height)
• Flash loading XML
• Flash creating elements on stage using library
• loading external images
• and more…

this example is for beginner level

example : http://www.hagane.us/as/gallery/
ZIP : http://www.hagane.us/as/gallery/gallery.zip

if you have any questions about PHP or Flash side please post it here

EDIT: sorry for wrong links and config. Everything is corrected now and fully functional
thanks people who noted me about errors!