Category Archives: actionscript

tutorials.as3.ca is online!

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Hi everyone,

although right now it doesn’t look like much, I spent the last day compiling the best AS3 tutorials I could find on the internet. I have good ideas for this site, and I hope I will get the time to make it a reality. For now it will just serve to boost the indexing spot on search engines for those tutorials, but .. you know… it’ll come!

have a look for yourselves (yes, I know it is ugly). I am no designer.. http://tutorials.as3.ca

Take good care, much to come in december as I finally have a break from work and I am not travelling!!! :)

Martin

Should we start learning Javascript once again?

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Hi Everyone,

with HTML 5 being adopted by more and more browsers out there, with DailyMotion releasing an HTML5 version of the movie profile page, and YouTube doing the same; there comes a question: should I get back to learning Javascript?

The posts on the subject abound all over the internet:

HTML 5 versus Flash / Flex

Adobe was heard saying:

It might be a decade before HTML 5 sees standardization across the number of browsers that are going to be out there (…)

Right.. I think it will take 2 years. I think in 2 years, you better get really good with the Google Web Toolkit if you want to be on the cutting edge. Otherwise, you can wait 4-5 years. And who will save our jobs: Microsoft. By being the shittiest browser out there, Internet Explorer will help keep the value of actionscript knowledge high for atleast another 2 years.

That is my take. What is yours?

:)

Martin

YouTube AS3 API link..

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Hi everyone,

I had all but forgotten about this post on the official Youtube docs.. I will spend some time in the near future on the API to clear up some confusion and write more examples; plus finish the implementation of the interactive part of the functionality.

In the meantime, here is the link to the article… http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/articles/youtube_actionscript3.html

:)

Martin

Tutorial – Creating Custom Components (Visual Controls) in pure AS3 – Part 1

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Hi Everyone,

Looking back at the last 4-5 years I spent developing Flash widgets & applications (again, I do NOT participate in marketing efforts.. so no micro-sites or bogus games for me) I realize that one of the core abilities of a good Flash application developer is his ability to develop components from scratch. The better you get at this, the more valuable you become. At first you try to develop simple components: buttons, radio buttons, check boxes, thumbnail viewers; then move on to more difficult ones: accordeons, tooltips, tabbed panels, tree controls.

Imagine, whatever your client asks you, you say: “Yes I can do”. This ability is very precious, it takes years of efforts to develop properly but once you have acquired it, there is no limit to what you can do. W/o this ability, you are limited to what you can integrate from libraries or packages. You can compare this to the difference between a composer and a DJ. The DJ can only mix tracks, but the composer can actually make up any music he wants!

Last summer I had a big challenge while working for Adobe: rebuild the DataGrid to enable it to show multiple levels of data, with animated filtering. It works, however is hasn’t been integrated inside of the Verizon Wireless Media Store yet, maybe one day!

Since that challenge, my perspective changed; in fact the experience at Abode proved very instructive. I have to thank Paul, Josh, Dave, Tommy, and Bjorn for this.

In this article I will describe the foundation of most of the custom components I build, a simple class called BaseControl. The ideas behind this class come from a Tutorial I first read in 2004 from Joey Lott, which I implemented in AS2 and then migrated to AS3.
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TIP – Converting a textual HEX color value to int

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Hi Everyone,

just a short tip today on how to convert values like this : #00FF00 from a config file, letsay, to something you can use inside of your AS3 code.

Here it is

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function digestHexColor(color:String):Number
{
	var col:Number = parseInt(color.substr(1), 16);
	if (isNaN(col))
		col = 0xffffff;
 
	return col;
}

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Tutorial – Implementing your own CallLater function is AS3 (Flash or Flex)

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Hi Everyone,

Although I am not a big fan of the CallLater function in Flex’s UIComponent, I must admit that it is sometimes handy. Here is how you can implement your own CallLater function, this code can be incorporated inside of any class, enabling you to add functions that are called after the current thread of execution has been depleted.

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Tutorial – addEventListener code completion in Flash Develop

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Hi Everyone,

in one of the recent releases of FlashDevelop they added a wonderful feature which lets you see what events are dispatched by the objects you are using. This is done through some meta tags inside of the class declaration and the result is very valuable. It looks like this:

addEventListener auto-completion in Flash Develop
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AS3 – LineArt Filter – Experiments

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Hi Everyone,

live from Bangkok!! lol. It’s songkram here, if you don’t want to get wet stay inside and write on your blog.

So I have to detect the location of an item on images for one of my project, I thought of using the LineArt filter to detect high contrast areas, enabling me to pinpoint the exact space on the image (in this case transparent png’s), because they are sometimes not centered.

The code from the LineArt filter comes for a very good book called “Kickass Java Programming” published in 1998. I simply ported to AS3, which was trivial.

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Custom Filters in AS3

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Hi Everyone,

Well, this is a short post; I know I have been busy lately (have been teaching AS3 quite a bit, which is fun, at Loto Québec and Canoe.ca) + work on the regular contracts. Anyhow, this to say that I have a lot of material I wish to write about, and hopefully next month I will get time to breathe and write again.

In the meantime, today I wanted to create a custom filter in AS3; namely a StrokeFilter. To my great disappointment the filter functionality on DisplayObjects is not extensible, so no way to create custom filter classes..
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