While working at Rare Method our team invested a lot of effort into designing and developing this great interactive Flash and HTML/CSS hybrid site. ArtPad was commissioned by the Calgary Glenbow Museum for the purpose of informing and interesting youth in contemporary art. I’m not sure when this site finally went live, but chances are that you have never seen or even heard about it, as I was unable to find a press release or news article anywhere. Take a few minutes to check it out. I think you will enjoy it and maybe learn a thing or two about contemporary art.
http://www.glenbow.org/artpad
I just finished skimming through this book and have decided that every Flex developer should own a copy. I have been developing Flex applications for over a year now and I still managed to learn a ton of new things from this book. The authors have done an excellent job of formatting the book into problem and solution scenarios. Quick and easy answers. The book starts off with issues a Flex noob might encounter and then proceeds all the way up to issues a Flex pro might encounter. Each solution includes code and a discussion/explination. This book is not really a cover to cover read, but more of a quick reference that you want to have within an arms reach while coding. I still recommend skimming through it when you first get it, because I’m sure you’ll learn a bunch of new tidbits right off the bat.
You can get more info and purchase this book here.
I just stumbled across a great article by Josh Tynjala on the Yahoo! Flash Developer Center. Josh writes about the new features of ActionScript 3.0, focusing on working with the Display List, changes to root and parent, and encapsulation. I’m sure this article has been around for some time, but if you are just getting into AS3 and have not yet seen this article, then I highly recommend you read it.
http://developer.yahoo.com/flash/articles/display-list.html
The Yahoo! Flash Developer Center also has some great open-source components available for download. I am playing around with the Charts and I am very impressed. These seem like a great and free alternative to FusionCharts, which at this time are not available for ActionScript 3.0.
Here are some examples of the Yahoo! ASTRA Charts:
http://developer.yahoo.com/flash/astra-flash/charts/examples.html
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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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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