This example builds on the previous button group example - essentially a group of buttons that have a “disabled” state indicating which button was clicked last, and some animation effects courtesy of Tweener.

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After getting one button to work, you can get several to work together, in what’s called a “button group.” This is a pretty common UI situation where you have several buttons but each has a “disabled” state indicating it was the last one the user clicked on. The button stays in this state until the user clicks on another button. As an added feature, the instance name of the last button clicked appears on the Stage.

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Here’s how to create a preloader in ActionScript 3. The AS2 methods have been thrown out and the new model uses event listeners.

“loaderInfo” is the general state of the SWF as it’s loaded. While it’s loading, you get a progress event, and upon completion, a complete event. Here’s some sample code:

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Continuing on from the simple button example you can set up an external ActionScript file that contains all your code.

This is setting up a “document class”. You first create an ActionScript file and save it in the same directory as your Flash file; it will have the extension .as. Then go into your Flash file and in the Properties Inspector in the field “Document class”, enter the name of your ActionScript file. Don’t include the extension “.as”. If you did this correctly, when you click on the pencil icon, your external ActionScript file will open.

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I’m finally getting around to learning ActionScript 3 and what better way to learn than forcing myself to upgrade an ActionScript 2 project and working on some other simple ones. Over several posts I’ll document what I’ve discovered, mostly as a personal reference so I can refer to them later.

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Again, this post consists of notes for myself, but someone else out there might find them interesting.

I’ve used McTween in Flash for quite some time now. It’s a code extension to Flash that makes many animations extremely easy to implement. A newer version called Tweener has been developed, and it obviously took me until now to move over. But after playing with it for a day I can already see it making some things much easier. There are ActionScript 2.0 and ActionScript 3.0 versions of Tweener.

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I’m posting this Flash problem more for my own future reference, but perhaps someone else will benefit.

Basically I’m generally wary of using the built-in Flash components, for whenever I get one working, I develop some bugs that have me wondering if I should have created something from scratch. My experience with the “ComboBox” component was no different.

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I made a goofy Gilmore Girls video game and then realized I messed something up that causes the preloader to not display right away - defeating the whole purpose of a preloader.

When dynamically loading and playing sounds in ActionScript, you may have correctly set your sound file in the library to Export for ActionScript and Export in first frame. It’s the latter item that messes things up. It seems Flash takes that first frame thing literally and will load those library items even before the ActionScript you have on frame one, layer one - which is usually your preloader code.

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In the interest of sharing information, this is the first in a series of “brain dump” posts regarding web design - specifically for folks who are starting a blog.

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Ever since the Series Finale of Gilmore Girls I have been thinking to myself how lame it was that Luke never got a chance to propose to Lorelai (again). So I made this video game that recaptures the frustration.

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