ActionScript Tips

The Five ActionScript Tips in Five Days blog series for Peachpit is now complete. You can always find these blog posts, along with other articles at www.studiosedition.com/articles or you can subscribe to the Studio Sedition article feed. The blog series is an example of what can be found in my latest book The ActionScript 3.0 Migration Guide, The: Making the Move from ActionScript 2.0.

videoPlayer, a reserved word?

I have been going crazy trying to determine why I could not add an FLVPlayback component to my AS2 application without creating an infinite loop. Apparently, I had a movie clip that contained the FLVPlayback I was attempting to add, which was named videoPlayer in the library. I'm happy I can rest now, but it leaves me wondering, is videoPlayer a reserved word?

FileReference to download server-side file

I was asked today how to download a server-side file through the FileReference object. The issue was that the server-side file was executing before downloading. The FileReference object uses http, rather than ftp, to download files, so any server-side script will execute before being downloaded. You either need to zip it and use the zip as a download or use an intermediate server-side file to write and return a server-side file for download.

Casting: String to Boolean

Convert the string value of a number to a Boolean with AS:

Boolean(Number("0"))

Consecutive onRelease/onPress bug

Here's an old issue that suddenly stumped me today. I have a button that acts as navigation and tends to be clicked consecutively in order to advance from screen to screen. The action would only register the first time unless the mouse was moved. Since I had such a hard time finding a solution online I thought that I would add mine to the few I found.

btn.onRelease = function()
{

this._focusrect = false;
Selection.setFocus(this);

}

Feel free to add your two cents, I would love to see other solutions.

Call for contractors

Studio Sedition is looking for a few top notch contractors to help with some ongoing web design and development work. If you are interested in finding out more details let us know what you know and why you think that you'd be a good fit: http://www.studiosedition.com/contact. Please allow us some time to get back in touch with you.

Flash CS3 Preview

Flash C3 can be previewed on the Flash Magazine web site. It looks amazing, from a design standpoint it integrates with Photoshop and Illustrator, even layers are supported! My favorite is the ActionScript editing and error checking, this has been an issue with Flash for many years and may finally be what all flash developers have been looking for. Check it out for yourself...

The State Of Web Development

I recently came across some interesting statistics from a survey that Ektron and SitePoint gave to 5,000 web developers. It projects some interesting trends in the future of technology, for instance, the use of Ajax to surpass Flash in 2007. Check it out for yourself...

JavaScript Tween Objects

Check out this JavaScript animation engine. For anyone familiar with the Flash ActionScript Tween classes this library looks just as easy to use. Happy tweening...