David Stiller’s blog

I’m on the technical advisory board for Sessions School of Design, a distance learning school based in New York.  Anjula Duggal, managing editor for the Sessions blog (DesignSessions:  Notes on Design), recently asked me to guest author a handful of articles for them, which I’m happy to do.  Thanks to Anjula and editor Katie Feo for helping to get me squared away! 

My first article is here:

http://blog.sessions.edu/web-design/how-to-save-bandwidth- when-displaying-flash-video/

Often, but not always, I syndicate my blog entries on the blog at Community MX, CMXtraneous.  That particular blog has a word limit on article length, so not everything I write makes it over — that, and sometimes I simply forget to copy/paste my content to both locations.  In any case, I don’t see replies to the CMX entries nearly as often as I do my own, but I do try to make the rounds.  I just found three replies to my recent “Making Buttons Work in Flash CS3 (ActionScript 3.0),” and since the CMX interface doesn’t seem to like replies with sample code in them, I’m replying to those comments here.  Keep reading »

At the time of this writing, Flash CS3 is still brand spankin’ new on the shelves.  For some lucky folks, whose companies presumably have volume discounts with Adobe, the latest version of Flash is already in their hands — has, in fact, already been installed without any fanfare or training.  Some of these designer/developers are finding, quite suddenly, that button symbols no longer seem to work in Flash CS3 (I’ve seen quite a few panic posts already on the Adobe forums).  What gives?  Is Flash broken?  Not a bit of it!    Let’s see what’s going on.  Keep reading »

ActionScript 3.0 introduces new data types galore, and two of the funniest looking are easily int and uint.  For one, they belong to an ultra-elite group whose names are fully lowercase (the third is void).  For two … well, I mean … uint.  Come on. 

What are these data types, and what are they good for?  Let’s take a look.  Keep reading »