Blog

First off, thanks for all of the comments on my Class Builder ladies and gents!

It has been diffucult to stay on top of things with the lack of internet; supposedly we get our phone hooked up today and our DSL tomorrow at our new house, but I feel so… disconnected with the world. Coupled with the fact my house borders on the boonies, it’s certainly adds to the decor of my feelings.

At any rate, this Flash Panel was another learning tool used for my delvings into JSAPI. I’ve been trying to use it for all the things that I felt I couldn’t do in Flash’s authoring environment. Hopefully I’ll add more if I’m so inclined, but for now, this little tool simply allows you to mass toggle the “Export in First Frame” option for all of the symbols in the library. Since you have to manually do this via right click on each symbol, this is an insane timesaver for me, specially for non-SWC components (Flash MX files).

I have a few more ideas, but I’d love to hear more if you all have them. Hopefully this will help you not only in your work, but a FLA to learn from as well. Some things I learned:
– using LoadVars to quickly test JSAPI doesn’t work like you’d expect.
– return values from MMExecute are usually strings… I’ve yet to be able to get complex datatypes to work with easily, but then again, I’m still learning so could be doing it wrong
– I now have no idea where Flash MX 2004 puts it’s Window SWF’s. In MX, it was in your Documents and Settings folder, and whatever was in First Run was copied there… now I can’t find it. (No, haven’t searched beyond manually looking in that directory)

JXL Library Tools – <a href=”https://www.jessewarden.com/downloads/JXL Library Tools.zip”>ZIP</a> | <a href=”https://www.jessewarden.com/downloads/JXL Library Tools.mxp”>MXP</a>

First, my manager showed me how to set a breakpoint in an external file yesterday (after he asked me how and I couldn’t tell him). Call me dumb cause you knew this 2 years ago (hey, your neat). In the debugger, when it says, “The Flash Player is paused so that
breakpoints may be adjusted. Click
Continue to start the movie.” I never knew what that message meant, until yesterday. Basically, there is a dropdown above that message. You can select your script in there (may have 2 sometimes) and then scroll to your code and set a break point. There were some cases where it had the script name twice, but if you can’t set a breakpoint, choose the next script. That way, you can keep all of your code external, but still debug it without adding garbage code or coming in from another script.

Second, check what some bastard did Tuesday night to my car in my apartment (flat) complex and didn’t leave a note! Few hunnerd bucks… *sigh*

<a href=”https://www.jessewarden.com/images/car_busted_1.jpg”>https://www.jessewarden.com/images/car_busted_1.jpg</a>

<a href=”https://www.jessewarden.com/images/car_busted_2.jpg”>https://www.jessewarden.com/images/car_busted_2.jpg</a>

Third, I just got my copy of Studio 2004 from one of my editors!!! Yum…

<a href=”https://www.jessewarden.com/images/studio_lick.jpg”>https://www.jessewarden.com/images/studio_lick.jpg</a>

Finally, <b>Happy Halloween!</b>

I know their are other primers out there (<a href=”http://www.person13.com/articles/index.jsp”>Joey Lott: ActionScript 2.0 Primer</a>, <a href=”http://www.ultrashock.com/tutorials/flashmx2004/as2-01.php”>Dave Yang: ActionScript 2.0</a>) but I think it is my duty do provide this information as simply as possible because of the current agitated feelings of AS1 vs AS2 (<a href=”http://www.waxpraxis.org/archives/000133.html”>case 1</a> and <a href=”http://www.waxpraxis.org/archives/000134.html”>case 2</a>). My goal is to show it’s relatively easy to write AS2, flexible enough so you don’t have to immerse yourself 100% to consider yourself coding in AS2 100%, and not slow to develop with. I’m going to try to do something I never do: Be succinct and not use slang (still using contractions, though).

<strike>I don’t think this is <a href=”http://www.powersdk.com/ted/2003_10_01_archive.html#106735376547742843″>ego-driven crap</a></strike>, I think people have a lot of time they have invested in learning Flash, which many use to do their job, get their paychecks, and pay their bills and feed their mouths. This is a very important subject for us using Flash in our daily lives as well as those, like Branden, who probably invested a lot of physical and emotional time up front, and therefore, have a lot invested in it all.
<code>
AS1 – Simple Class

Went digging and found this neato property:

_global.style.modalTransparency = 50;

When you create a pop-up (remember my disable the entire movie code?), it creates a fullscreen movie clip so you can create modal dialogues. However, I couldn’t see it, and thought that was kind of dumb, so went looking to see how the PopUpManager created it. It’s a lazy use of a property; if it’s there, it uses it. So, if you do the above, it’ll be a hazy white. Pretty cool!

Full kizz-node:
– put a Button on stage
– put an Alert on stage
– delete the Alert
– use this code on frame 1

import mx.managers.PopUpManager
import mx.controls.Alert

_global.style.modalTransparency = 50;
PopUpManager.createPopUp(this, null, true);

Optionally, you could replace null with Alert, but the point here is just to see the transparency difference. One thing of note, however, is you cannot “animate” using this property. I tried an onEnterFrame of it, but it merely sets the mc’s alpha via this property, nothing more. If you wish to animate the modal blocker’s alpha or color, you’ll have to get a reference to the mc by modifying the createPopUp method to return a refernce to the movie clip. Just don’t distribute the code… it’s against Macromedia’s EULA, hehe!