David Stiller’s blog

In one implementation of the QuickTime VR format, known as QTVR Object Movies, the user can click-and-drag an image to seemingly rotate it, as if spinning the real-life object on a lazy Susan.  This simulated 3D interactivity can improve multimedia curb appeal, and makes for a nifty way to showcase merchandise.  But it doesn’t stop there:  the same basic principle can also bring click-and-drag responsiveness to short video sequences and even user input widgets, such as the click-and-scrub input fields of numerous Adobe dialog boxes.  Keep reading »

In one of the recent comments to “How to Position Movie Clips Based on Browser Resizing,” a look at the ActionScript 2.0 Stage.onResize event, reader Eddy asked about adjusting an image loaded at runtime; particularly, about fading in an image set to scale and reposition itself based on the size of the browser.  I was originally going to reply to his comment directly, but this seems to me like something that would make a decent blog entry of its own, so here’s one particular stab at it.  Keep reading »

I just finished the last of my eleven chapters for a new O’Reilly title, ActionScript 3.0:  The Quick Answer Guide for Flash Professionals, last Wednesday.  This was shortly after lunch, 12:30 on the dot, and a neat thing happened almost as I lifted my hands from the keyboard (more on that in a sec).  The rest of the book is still being written, and it’s shaping up nicely.  I’m pretty excited about this project already!    The aim of this reference is to help developers, even keyframe coders, get up to speed with AS3, so keep your eyes peeled in June!

I took a wild tumble off the grid while I was researching and writing for the past five or six weeks, so I apologize for my late replies to blog comments and email.  I’ve been catching up on my inbox since last Wednesday and plan to reply to everyone as soon as I can.  Thanks, so much, to my friends for all the encouragement!  (Go, FlashGods.org!)

I’ll be going over author reviews in the coming weeks, but the heavy lifting is behind me.  The neat thing that happened, on day I finished, is this:  I went downstairs to gaze out the window for a few moments, and right as I did, UPS brought a package to the door.  I opened the box, and inside was a huge tin of Turkish coffee (over a pound!), imported from Turkey, sent by reader Çağatay.  What a way to commemorate the milestone!  Thanks, Çağatay!  This coffee is a real treat!

You certainly don’t need ActionScript to make use of embedded fonts.  You can always just embed font outlines manually by selecting a text field, then using the Embed button in the Property inspector.  Select your range of characters, type in your text, then publish; you’re good to go (and you only need to do it with dynamic and input text fields:  static text fields embed font outlines automatically).  In fact, if your text field has an instance name — something you can also set in the Property inspector — then you can determine its text content with ActionScript and the embedded font outlines still hold.  But if you’re using ActionScript to create text fields on the fly, the mechanics are a bit different.  Let’s take a look.  Keep reading »

One of the main tenets of good Web design is the principle of progressive enhancement.  In general, the idea goes like this:  make sure the user can access a web site’s essential content regardless of browser.  It shouldn’t matter whether the user visits your site with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Netscape, or pick your favorite flavor.  In fact, the site’s content should be accessible even without JavaScript or peripheral plugins like Flash Player.  Once the basics are covered, use CSS to enhance the visual design.  Then, and only then, introduce the whizz-bang stuff — nifty rollovers, AJAX interactivity, Flash — and do it in a way that doesn’t penalize users who don’t have (or choose to disable) the needed machinery.

Sound pretty neat?  I’ve seen a few examples of this online and at conferences, so I delved into this topic myself to see how much fun it might be.  Turns out it can be somewhat challenging, but definitely fun to see the results.  I put together an example in order to explore the basic mechanics of this form of progressive enhancement — a slideshow SWF that takes its cue from the HTML in which it appears — and turned it into a three-part series on CommunityMX.com.  The first part is free and covers how to get the HTML from the Web page itself into the SWF.  The follow-up articles go into how to parse that HTML in AS2 and AS3.  CommunityMX offers free trial memberships, so if you aren’t interested in becoming a subscriber, you can wait until the follow-up that interests you gets posted (not sure yet when that will be), then sign up for the trial membership.  Of course, if you want to subscribe, that would be cool too!

http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=02395

Flash Player has supported a limited subset of the HTML specification since version 6 — just set a text field’s htmlText property to an HTML-formatted string and you’re good to go.  Fortunately, <a> (anchor) tags are among the supported few, which means you can even put working hyperlinks inside your text.  Not only that, but Flash includes a special protocol, asfunction, that allows you to trigger functions from those hyperlinks, in case you prefer to do that instead of visiting URLs.  ActionScript 3.0 uses a different approach, but if you’re coding in AS1 or 2, just replace http://someURL.com with asfunction:someFunction,someParam, as described elsewhere on this blog.  If you’re coding in timeline keyframes, it’s all pretty straightforward.  But asfunction can seemingly break when used in custom class files.  Here’s what’s going on and how to fix it.  Keep reading »

Reader James Colvin wrote me in mid-December to ask if I had any thoughts on playing a timeline backwards.  As it turns out, this question comes up every now and then on the Adobe forums, where longtime regular kglad usually posts his very handy custom function in reply.  In kglad’s version, the MovieClip.nextFrame() and prevFrame() methods are used in cahoots with setInterval() to accomplish the goal.  He often assigns the function to the Object.prototype property of the MovieClip class, which makes the new functionality available to all movie clips (a pre-AS3 technique).

My initial reaction was to search the forums and send back a link, but James’ question had an interesting twist:  could this non-standard timeline movement include easing?  Wow, what a cool challenge!  So I thought about it off and on over the holidays, and a neat solution occurred to me just this morning.  Keep reading »

I wrote a cue points article last year (October, 2006) for what was then called the Adobe Dev Center.  One of the editors recently asked me to update that article for Flash CS3, which I was happy to do.  It’s now available on the Adobe Developer Connection at the following URL.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/actionscript/articles/cue_points_audio.html

If you’re looking for a way to assign cue points to audio files (especially MP3 files loaded at runtime), I hope you find this article useful.  It steps through a custom SoundSync class in ActionScript 2.0 and 3.0.

Half a year ago, I wrote a brief article on “How to Play Sound Files Sequentially” (AS2).  Recently, a reader was asking how to apply the same principle to video.  In his case, Paul had to play a commercial first, then follow it with a longer content video — and the user controls (buttons, scrubber, etc.) needed to be disabled wile the commercial was playing.  As it turns out, Paul worked out a solution of his own, partly based on some of the other articles here, but I thought it would be fun to do a quick version too.  That way, he can compare notes and anyone else can look on.  Keep reading »

Video cue points can be used for all sorts of things in Flash.  Typical uses involve triggering other activity, such as peripheral movie clips whose animations enhance the video content, or triggering text, such as closed captions.  I’ve seen some developers in the Adobe forums even use a cue point to signal that a video clip has reached its end.  Strictly speaking, cue points aren’t needed for that last goal (see “How to Determine the Completion of a Flash Video (FLV) File”), but it’s certainly a possible way to go.

If you’re interested in cue points yourself, but don’t know where to begin, let’s dive in.  Keep reading »