Adding Flash/Actionscript Content to a Flex Project

by Devon O.· March 29, 2008· in Actionscript, Flash· 0 comments
In my recent quest to quick cram as much Flex knowledge possible into my head, I thought I’d take a look at injecting Flash or pure actionscript content into Flex. For those who’ve been using Flex, this will be old hat. For those such as myself, though, who are just making their way into Flex from a Flash development point of view, this may just save a bit of frustration and aggravation. Probably the easiest way to add a little Flash to a Flex project is to load in a compiled .swf file using the SWFLoader component. Let’s begin with a basic rotating cube made with Actionscript and Papervision3D. I’ll add this to a package named com.onebyonedesign.cube which will later be in the Flex project’s classpath, but for a moment, I’ll just be using good ol’ Flash. CubeExample.as [crayon-6108bc8ad6b5a409370603/] Now, let’s open up Flash and compile a 400×400 pixel .swf containing the CubeExample using the following document class: [crayon-6108bc8ad6b6e153584478/] Now, fire up a new Flex project however you normally do so (personally I use the FlashDevelop Actionscript editor and the free Flex SDK). Make sure the .swf you just generated above (we’ll call it “cube.swf”) is in your output directory (usually named […]
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Passing Arguments to Event Listening Methods

by Devon O.· March 28, 2008· in Actionscript· 1 comments
I’ve seen this question asked in several forums. Enough, anyway, that I would remark on it. The question takes many a form, but it boils down to this: How does one pass arguments to a method acting as an event listener in Actionscript 3? In general there are three broad routes to take: Using a custom object and accessing its properties with the currentTarget property of whatever Event the method is listening for. Dispatching a custom event which can contain its own properties. Using a Dictionary object instance to hold references associated with event dispatching objects.  Let’s take a little look at each of these. With the custom object approach, arguments you wish to access in an event listener are added to the event dispatching object as properties. This is most useful when you want the event handling to be performed in a class which contains the dispatching object. A quick example: The custom object: [crayon-6108bc8ae4f02436585416/] And document class: [crayon-6108bc8ae4f17735684571/] As you can see, the foo and bar properties are “passed” to the event listening method as actual properties of the object clicked. The custom event approach is most useful when you wish event handling to be done within the dispatching object. […]
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Officially Certifiable

by Devon O.· March 14, 2008· in Flash, Life· 0 comments
They all said the day would come.. But you know the sorts of things “They” like to say… But after returning from another sisyphean week of floating in the Atlantic, I discovered the Good News in my inbox. Back in December I was one of the lucky few (or many – who knows) who was allowed to participate in the beta program for Adobe’s new ACA (Adobe Certified Associate) test. Long story short, I am now an official Adobe Certified Associate in Rich Media Communication using Adobe Flash CS3.. Whew.. that’s quite a mouthful…  For a gander at the certificate, check out the little ACA badge in the sidebar to the right. And the pantokrator smiles…
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“FontBox” – ComboBox for Font Selection

by Devon O.· March 02, 2008· in Actionscript, Flash· 0 comments
Many moons ago someone over at the Kirupa forum asked how to create a combo box that could display a list of fonts in their “natural state”. Sounded pretty interesting so I whipped together a quick example that made use of some graphics in the .fla library. It was nice and worked, but I thought I’d revisit this idea and rework it so no custom graphics were necessary. Unfortunately, it still requires fonts to be included in the .fla library which, of course, jacks up the file size, but that can’t really be avoided. The final result is here: the graphics class [crayon-6108bc8ae511e503610768/] The event class: [crayon-6108bc8ae5127716677912/] The “main” class: [crayon-6108bc8ae512b172254170/] And finally a document class test: [crayon-6108bc8ae512f063857784/] which yields:
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Devon O. Wolfgang

AIR | Unity3D | AR/VR

Unity Certified Developer

Technical Reviewer of “The Essential Guide to Flash CS4 AIR Development” and “Starling Game Development Essentials”

Reviewer of “The Starling Handbook”

Unity Engineer at Touch Press.

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