A few posts ago, I showed you how to build a basic menu using an Array of button names. Now, I will demonstrate how to build the same menu, but this time use the new XML class which is based on E4X. There are many benefits of using XML in your applications. The main reason being that it allows you to update your application instantly without having to open up Flash to republish it. XML also allows your application to be easily updated from a server side page that generates XML output. This opens up the possibility of using a CMS to modify your application, thus enabling your clients to make updates on their own. Almost every project I develop uses XML.
And now for the code:
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Mike Downey presented a preview of the next version of Flash (codename Blaze) at Flashforward Austin 2006. New features include the ability to import Photoshop files directly into Flash allowing for precise control over every layer. You can make choices about each layer separately and also edit the imported text fields. There will be support for layer modes, drop shadows, blurs, and more. Flash will also be using the the JPEG compression from the next version of Photoshop.
If you have any ideas for Blaze you should submit them to the Flash 9 wishlist.
Be sure to check out this years Flashforward Film Festival Finalists. There were 60 finalists in 15 categories. You can view all of the finalists at http://www.flashforwardconference.com/finalists.
The following sites were selected as the best of their category:
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O’Reilly’s has recently launched a search engine that will scour through nearly 700 of their books, including over 123,000 individual examples, composed of 2.6 million lines of code. I think O’Reilly has published around 21 ActionScript related books at this time.
http://labs.oreilly.com/code/
Today I have decided to build a simple ActionScript 3.0 horizontal menu based on an array. This is a fairly common practice in Flash development as we are often using data provided from a XML file to dynamically update content within our movies. To simplify this tutorial I am going to use an array that is written within my code instead of parsing it from a XML file.
The following example will demonstrate how to loop through an array and draw a button for each item in that array. Each button will have a label, an up state and an over state. I have read that it is good practice to use the SimbleButton object whenever possible, but I am not going to use the it in this tutorial because I am interested in learning more about addChild(), getChildByName(), currentTarget, mouseChildren and other features of ActionScript 3.0 that could be avoided using the SimpleButton.
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