FlashGuru Blog

Jonas Galvez, a news author over at onRelease() has been secretly stocking up flash code in a directory on Aral’s webserver for sometime now, there are lots of high quality, well written, Prototype functions, samples, experiments and source code for your beedy eyes to transmit to your brain. He also tells me that he will be shortly creating an overview page and updating this directory with more code almost on a daily basis.

Grant Skinner, the author of the amazingly beautified online flash applications, the recently released AS.UML.Modeller AKA GModeler, an online UML Class Modelling tool built entirely in Flash and FlashOS2 a mini online operating system also built entirley in flash, kindly donated flashguru.org to me some months ago, and i only just realised that it was now pointing to flashguru.co.uk, so if you fancy a change from your typing patterns, you can now access this site using the url www.flashguru.org, Thanks Grant.

By default, in the local test player(Control > Test Movie), if you try and press the enter key, to test some code that uses it, your code will not work because the player over-rides the key press as a keyboard shortcut to pause and play the movie, the same goes for the tab key and other important system keys, such as Ctrl, Shift etc… So if you want to test your tabIndexes in the test player, so u can use trace and the debugger, simply select Disable Keyboard Shortcuts from the Control menu (Control > Disable Keyboard Shortcuts) and your code will now recieve the key presses. Saves me alot of faffing around! Think this is something else i was slow on, these little fine details just fly over my head.

This is a basic one but its very useful, and im not sure if i was just slow to catch on, or if people didnt actually know that this existed.It was only recently that i realised that if you select a large amount of text in the actionscript editor and press tab, that it is all indented, and that if you select a large amount of text and then hold shift and press tab, the text is outdented. Maybe this is a standard text editor function but ive never used it before. Comes in very useful when you are removing an enclosing if statement.

FlexiDev today announced the release of Asset Mover, a Flash development tool that both optimizes preload indicators and improves file size within Macromedia Flash 5 and Flash MX movies. Asset Mover allows Flash developers to move a Flash movie’s linked assets to a frame of their choice. This feature is not provided in Macromedia Flash 5, and has limited control in Flash MX. Linked assets are automatically located in the first frame. By reassigning linked assets to a later frame in the movie, developers may gain more control over the apparent speed with which their Flash files download. Asset Mover also identifies and removes redundant linked assets to reduce file size. Asset Mover retails for US$24.95 and is available at the company website. A free demo version is also available.

The Macromedia Designer & Developer Center has been updated today, with a new sample application created with Macromedia Studio MX, The Wildlife Project, plus lots of reading to accompany it. Aswell as six Flash MX related articles, mainly to do with advertising, at the new Rich Media Advertising Development Center, which doesnt interest me personally but may be of interest to you. [Via Mesh On MX]

Sometimes it is necessary to determine if a file exists using actionscript, for example when you have a preloader cue, that loads a series of .jpgs one after another, if one of the files doesnt exist then the cue wouldnt traverse any further, you could of course use a timeout in that scenario but why not just check if the file exists before loading it, so that if necessary you can move onto the next item in the cue almost instantly. It is possible to determine whether a file exists using the success parameter of the onLoad event handler, the problem lies in the fact that the onLoad event handler for movieclips doesnt work, so to check if an .swf file exists, or an image, you will need to use this method…
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Fonts For Flash has loads of new fonts, font packs and freebies for you to use in your flash projects, be sure to check out the cool typefaces!

Nominations for the Flash Film Festival 2003 are running until 27th Janurary so get your site, or your favourite site nominated in the appropriate category, notice the new Application category this year?

Dylan Marks has released a TextFieldFormatter Class which adds the ability to enforce a particular order/type of input into an input textfield. Download it, its very cool code to read, even if you dont think you will ever need to use it. [Via onRelease]

There is a rather fancy new page on the Macromedia webserver, that contains alot of streaming video for your viewing pleasure. Yes! its the Macromedia Devcon 2002, Keynote sessions streamed to your computer using FlashComm. Check it out! [Via Flazoom]

CustomActions is lurking in your actionscript window, hiding under Objects/Authoring/CustomActions but do u know what it does? and do you know how to use it? if not then read Fernando Florez’s tutorial on DevMX, to fill you in on all the gorey details.

Northcode are currently conducting a public beta of the sequel to SWFStudio, the tool that greatly extends the local capabilities of flash. For more information on getting yourself a sneak peek and helping Tim Goss fix some bugs, read this page.

Fla2swf is a free utility provided courtesy of Northcode, the makers of SWFStudio, that allows you to publish a .fla file from the command line. It has quite a few possible usages so get yourself a copy here.

Mike Chambers website, Mesh On MX has had a rather shweet fresh bucket of paint recently, courtesy of Josh Dura, the url of his blog has also changed to http://www.markme.com/mesh/ which is now much easier to remember. So update your bookmarks and links to his site.

Mike Williams the Macromedia Flash Product Manager now has his own blog, im sure that there will be some interesting discussions and information over there very shortly, so stay tuned.

Robert Penner has put together a rather lengthy but very complete review of the new book Actionscript: The Definitive Guide Second Edition, be sure to check it out over at Ultrashock’s new Book Review section.