Check out the video on Youtube to get a preview of what is coming in the new version of Flash Player, codenamed Astro. The video is from the MAX conference in Chicago.

Some highlights include:

• Native 3D controls, similar to Papervision3D
• Enhanced Text abilities
• Custom Filters and Blend Modes

You can get some more information about Astro at Lee Brimelow’s blog TheFlashBlog. Another post about Astro at TheFlashBlog.

Published my first article for Devlounge today. It’s just a little article about how piracy helps Adobe’s sales, rather than harm it like Adobe (and most other companies) tell us. Check the article out here.

And for a brief update on this site, I’ve been working hard on a very large article for Devlounge, which is why the posts here have been few and far between. I’m hoping to remedy this situation soon, so please hang in there!

The beta of Papervision3D was released a couple of days ago, and it appears to be quite the 3D engine for Flash. In the past I have seen demos of a fully 3D game, based on X-Wing vs. Tie-Fighter, built in Flash using Papervision3D. This game was even altered to use a Nintendo Wii controller as an input device, so you could fly the X-Wing around with the flick of a wrist. There was a fairly impressive example of four rotating panes that played flv’s on them for Northface that was done a number of months ago.

All in all, it seems to be a very powerful tool for any Flash Developer to add to their skill set. I have not yet used it in a project, mainly because I haven’t needed any crazy 3D animations that would require such an engine, but I’m hoping for a chance to use it soon.

Check out some demos of what Papervision3D is capable of, or visit the main blog page.

I spend a pretty good deal of time reading other people’s tutorials, browsing flash blogs and forums and generally trying to find all the info about Actionscript development that I can. With the exception of the developers who stay on top of their game, and know the ins and outs of Actionscript, I’m seeing more and more people picking up and using old code, like on() and onClipEvent(). While neither event handler method has officially been deemed deprecated, both have served their time and been replaced by more standards compliant methods which also include additional functionality.

The majority of Flash and Actionscript tutorials indexed in the major tutorial indexes give me the impression they are either very old tutorials or they are written by people who don’t know Actionscript well enough to right the code in tutorial properly. This is a big pet peeve of mine. I want to actually teach people useful things about Actionscript, not just show them how to do something nifty that they’ll never have any hope of figuring out. Part of teaching someone to do something typically involves teaching them the right way to go about doing it.

[ Read more ]

After taking some time to talk with AJ, the owner of Devlounge, he decided to have me come aboard as an author for the Devlounge Team, and kick off a new section of the website devoted to Flash and Actionscript. Needless to say I am pretty happy with with this. Subscribe to my feed to get note of when I post new articles over there, or go subscribe to the Devlounge feed. My first article will be about using XML in Flash to get content where you want it to be, not where some tutorial has you put it. The goal of the tutorial will be to teach you the fundamentals of XML design and creation, as well as integrating that information with your Flash project.

Thats all for now, stay tuned for the big update!

When I built this website, I wanted the layout to be fluid, but not too fluid. My reasoning for this is mostly due to my own experience browsing the web. The resolution on my computer is 1920×1200, which gives me plenty of screen “real estate”, but it typically makes fixed width websites look very very tiny with a huge amount of white space (which just emphasizes the small look) on each side of the content. On the flip side, a completely fluid website looks very stretched and awkward in most circumstances.

So, I decided I would try and build a website that would look good in all window sizes be it in IE or Firefox. I tossed in some simple styles into my CSS (you can view the CSS below) and viola! Firefox was working great! But when I checked it out in IE, it didn’t work at all. After a bit of research and fiddling with my CSS, I figured out how to get it working in IE (or so I thought). A handy little bit of JavaScript in the CSS. Note: this will only work if the visitor has JavaScript enabled.

[ Read more ]

Actionscript is a language that uses what is called “Dot Notation” to reference objects. An object includes movie clips, variables, properties and functions or methods. So to refer to objects you would usually do something like:

For every object that you want to reference, you separate it from the previous item with a dot, hence the name dot notation.

This is great when you know what you are referencing, but what happens if you had a variable that holds a string referring to an instance name of a movie clip, and you wanted to tell that movie clip the string refers to go and play frame 10?

[ Read more ]

I’d like to take a moment to apologize to all of the visitors to this site who are using Internet Explorer.

It was recently brought to my attention by Dan (Faken) of Pixel2Life that one of my pages had a rather severe bug on it. This bug would throw an error to any IE user, and then kick them out. The problem, which turned out to be a conflict with swfObject and a lightbox plugin that I was using on the website, has now been fixed.

For more information on the bug and how to fix it, visit Aral Balkan’s Blog.

The basic button element in Flash can be rather limiting at times, but with the help of a movie clip and a bit of Actionscript, you can create some very interactive buttons for your Flash projects.

Rather than just having a normal up state and an over state like the default button elements, you can also add a rollout, down, and release outside state. This allows you to have buttons with complex animations that will increase the visual appeal of your Flash project.

The button you are going to make will just be a template that you can re-skin and use in any of your projects. It doesn’t look pretty yet, but it will give you a great foundation to work from. Beneath the template button is a skinned button that looks a bit nicer. It’s a small example of the kind of things you can do with it.
[ Read more ]

If you are a beginner when it comes to development, the concept of an if/else statement is probably something you know without actually realizing that you know it. It is one of the simpler theories of development that you can learn.

If statements are logic processes that we use every day to make decisions and the logic that applies to those types of real life situations is the exact same logic that applies to Actionscript. For example, if you are hungry, you go get something to eat. Breaking a statement like that down into Actionscript is very easy. Take a look at the following code.

[ Read more ]