Twitter usage is growing at a phenomenal rate—in just one year, Twitter grew by 1,382%. In January 2009, it received 4.5 million unique U.S. visitors. Recently I wrote an article called “Creating a Twitter Widget with Ajax,” which explained how to bridge the gap between a local website and remote RSS feed using PHP and […]
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Tips for Making a Painless Migration to ActionScript 3
There are many necessary ActionScript tasks used to create common Flash functionality. With all of the updates and changes made to ActionScript, figuring out how to accomplish some of the most simple tasks can require digging through search results or even Flash Help. This article will help alleviate a little of that pain by providing […]
Read moreUsing Functions, Properties, and Keywords in ActionScript 3
With unlimited, optional parameters, ActionScript 3 functions provide flexibility for unexpected additions. You can also control the access to the functions you create with new attribute keywords. If you have ever used the static keyword to create a pseudoconstant in ActionScript 2, you are a resourceful developer, but you’ll be happy to know that you […]
Read moreCreating a Full-Screen Web Site with Flash CS3
With all of the flexibility of liquid layouts in CSS, it’s easy to see why full-screen Flash web sites are becoming more popular. A full-screen Flash web site is one that takes up 100% of the browser window, but doesn’t scale according to the window size. This functionality is nothing new; it just hasn’t become […]
Read moreAnimating with XML in Flash CS3
Animation is fundamental to Flash. It’s the reason that Flash gained so much popularity in its early days. ActionScript 1 didn’t have any animation support, but ActionScript 2 brought power to developers who wanted to add animation to dynamic content with theTween object. However, ActionScript 2 had some limitations when creating externally-driven Flash movies through XML. […]
Read moreUsing Stylesheets in Flash CS3
All Web designers know that stylesheets create a consistent look throughout your web site and keep your code clean at the same time. However, when it comes to Flash, these useful tools are often overlooked. With stylesheets, for example, you can deploy your Flash movie and later change styles without republishing the movie. This article […]
Read moreFrom Flash to Flex: Understanding Flex Events
Everything in Flex occurs based on an event. This means that simply clicking a button or key to moving the mouse or receiving a response from a web service provides developers with the ability to trigger a custom event in their Flex applications. That’s a lot of control, and since Flex is not based on […]
Read moreFrom Flash to Flex: Creating ActionScript Components for Flex
The Flash to Flex series has covered the basic creation of a Flex project and making a move to ActionScript 3 (AS3). In this article we will take a deeper look at class creation in Flex and learn how to develop a reusable component for displaying and rotating headlines in any Flex application.
Read moreFrom Flash to Flex: Moving to ActionScript 3
For years there has seemed to be a stigma in the development community about developing with AS (ActionScript). With the release of AS 2 there was a huge shift and many more developers made a transition to Flash; and with the ability to create classes, existing Flash developers were finally able to begin writing object-oriented […]
Read moreFrom Flash to Flex: Integrating ActionScript with MXML
I’ve been using Flash since version 4 and think that I know most of the intricacies and workarounds in the application. I also consider myself an expert with XML and ActionScript, but when I tried to make the transition to Flex for the first time I was completely lost. The good news is that it’s […]
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