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
I just finished an AIR (Apollo) application that loads and saves data from an external XML file. I figured I would share the code to accomplish this task as there is not a lot of Apollo info around at this time.
First off lets start with loading an XML file and reading its contents. I realize that there are much easier ways to load XML into Flash than this, but the advantage here is that I can use File.applicationResourceDirectory which allows me to target the installation directory for the XML file that was included with the AIR package. In this snippet I am using the synchronous open method. This essentially pauses everything else in the Flash movie until it has completed its task (opening the file).
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Make sure you check out the launch of Adobe CS3 today at 3:30pm EST.
The new products include:
- Adobe InDesign CS3
- Adobe Photoshop CS3
- Adobe Illustrator CS3
- Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional
- Adobe Flash CS3 Professional
- Adobe Dreamweaver CS3
- Adobe Fireworks CS3
- Adobe Contribute CS3
- Adobe After Effects CS3
- Adobe Premiere Pro CS3
- Adobe Encore CS3
- Adobe Soundbooth CS3
The launch will be broadcasted here:
http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/launchevent/webcast/
If you are interested, here are the new features of Flash CS3
http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/features/
You can finally try Apollo for yourself. The alpha version of Apollo was released to the public on Adobe Labs this morning. This version lacks a lot of functionality that the final product will have, but gives us a chance to get our feet wet in the meantime.
You can download it here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/apollo/
I am sure this is old news to many of you, but today was the first time I have run into this issue. I am working on a site for a client that has very high accessibility requirements. I originally built my project to be controlled using the mouse and was asked this morning to add the ability to navigate it using the arrow keys of the keyboard. It only took me a couple minutes to get this functionality working in Flash, but when I tested it using Firefox I was not getting any response from the keyboard. I tried it out in IE7 and everything worked like a charm. After a couple minutes of searching I came across this site and found my solution. Apparently Firefox always returns the Key.isDown() function as false if you have wmode=”transparent” or wmode=”opaque” in your html object and embed tags, but if you use Key.getCode() everything works perfect.
Here is a snippet of code showing the workaround to this issue:
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