David Stiller’s blog

One of the facts of life in working with Flash is the way in which it displays semi-transparent nested symbols — which wasn’t what I expected, the first time I saw it.  To my thinking, the most fitting description is “the x-ray effect.”  Keep reading »

Yay!  Adobe updated their “Flash content displays on top of all DHTML layers” TechNote, which has been erroneous since its introduction in December, 2002.  The error wasn’t one of misinformation, merely an omission of one’s full set of choices, but I’m glad they revised this TechNote, because it pertains to WMODE, which comes up a lot in the official Flash forums.

I’m not sure when the revision occurred, but it was obviously some time between today and an earlier blog entry on this site in July of this year (2006).

In response to a question in one of the comments to “How to Reference Objects Dynamically,” here’s a code sample that illustrates one way to trigger event handlers of other objects.  Specifically, the commenter had a series of movie clip “buttons,” which had their own MovieClip.onRollOver and onRollOut event handlers.  She wanted to see the rollover and rollout effect without having to put the mouse near those movie clips.  (To put this in perspective, the movie clips in question were thumbnails in a slideshow.  She wanted to highlight the current thumbnail either by hovering over it or selecting it via a set of Prev and Next buttons.)  Let’s take a look.  Keep reading »

I’ve always been an advocate of naming Flash elements meaningfully — everything from timeline layers to Library assets (including Library folder names!).  If a FLA has any complexity at all, it’s simply cruel not to.  Yes, cruel.  If you’ve worked on complex FLAs without named assets, you’ll know that’s not too harsh an assessment.    Sure, it takes a bit more time to tack on expressive labels everywhere, but after a while, the effort becomes second nature, and the payoff is significant.  Recently, this habit led to an unexpected benefit for me.  Keep reading »

As with the Rubik’s Cube, I was heavy into the Milton Bradley game Simon, growing up.  (I was much better at Simon!)  I thought it would be fun to code up a clone in order to re-create the experience in Flash.  To make it as flexible as possible, I decided to incorporate the EventDispatcher class to keep outside code updated on the inner workings of the game.  This way, the class can be used to “record” and “playback” patterns of more than just colored lights and tones.  Keep reading »