Creating a Flash MX 2004 Component – A Walkthrough
This is a presentation I created in Macromedia Captivate. It will teach an intermediate Flash Developer familiar with coding how to create a Flash MX 2004 Component. I walk through the steps of creating a Login component that uses the component architecture from scratch.
I completed this Wednesday night after doing a second take Monday and Tuesday since my first attempt at one big Captivate file failed. I didn’t have time for additional edits and SWF construction till last night and tonight I spent 3 hours battling the MenuBar and trying to preload it. It seems that if you test streaming during a test movie in Flash, some of your traces aren’t called on static methods… just a guess at whats going on. I ravaged my local copies of MenuDataProvider/TreeDataProvider trying to find why their Initialize methods were getting called, but the traces I put in them didn’t work. I removed the copies from FirstRun and my Local Settings, and utilized the real component from Standard Components.fla vs. using the SWC… still no love. It works outside of Flash, though! …wtf…
Thanks Josh Dura, Greg Burch, Erik Bianchi, and anyone else that listened to my panicked cries about the above.
It was a fun first project, and although capturing the content was a snap, it took signifcant time during my off hours of the week to edit it to fruition. Although I now have a nice Flash framework to play movies in (I didn’t like Captivate’s MenuBuilder), I can see why RoboDemo buffs have jobs; what a lot of work! It just attests to the power of the tools; if we didn’t have these kinds of tools, I can’t even imagine how eLearning would even exist. Even so, Captivate has a ton of improvements to be made that I wrote down, which 20% can be waxed merely because I don’t know enough about it yet. It was fun! Thanks Macromedia for lowering the barrier of entry into this field via Captivate.
Tutorial Source Files – ZIP