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Guy Watson

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Top Stories by Guy Watson

Flash in its essence began as a tool for creating vector animations on the web. The Flash Player was designed specifically as a lightweight animation viewer to display those moving vector objects which are in their simplest form, mathematical equations that describe complex shapes made up of points, lines, curves and fills. However, nowadays developers and designers are using Flash to do a lot more than just animation, today we see Flash being used for everything from interactive banner ads to games and large applications with complex user interfaces. We are now pushing Flash to its limits and our frame rates are starting to suffer as we continue to develop content that is more application centric. The Flash Player has had obvious performance limitations for some time now:; the vector renderer inside the player generally coughs and splutters when it attempts to pla... (more)

Tree Component - Horizontal Scrolling

I've been playing around with the Tree Component in great depth and have found a few discrepancies which I feel are major pit holes. After a lot of searching, it was also clear that many other developers have come across the same issues. My main gripe: the tree component's support for horizontal scrolling is not very useful. I expected it to work like the ScrollPane's horizontal scrollbar, but it doesn't. Horizontal Scrolling: The Problem Now I have a little application that allows you to add and remove nodes to a tree, whooppee. Ok, so what happens if the user adds enough levels ... (more)

Extending Flash

Part 1 of this article (Vol. 1, issue 3) covered a general introduction to the Extensibility Layer and discussed the fundamental DOM and the relationship between different parts of a Flash document and their associated objects. It introduced the History panel and showed you how to build your own Flash panels. In this installment we take an in-depth look at XML2UI and Flash dialog boxes. Dialog Boxes - XUL Some of the Timeline Effects that come pre-installed with Flash MX 2004 allow the user to modify numerous settings to change the outcome of the effect. This is achieved using a... (more)

JSFL FileSystem API

This extension adds a new FileSystem object to the JSAPI which contains 23 new JSFL functions that allow you to modify/access the local FileSystem in your JSFL scripts. You can for example write to the registry using JSFL, execute external applications and so on… Documentation is provided for each of the new functions in the Help Panel. As of Macromedia Flash MX 2004 7.2 a new FLfile object is added to the JSAPI. It provides some, but not all of the functionality found in this extension. (more…) ... (more)

5 Flash Tips: onLoad Event Handler Not Working With loadMovie?

Tip #1: Neat Fix - onLoad Bug I have heard so many people moan on the many community forums and mailing lists about the onLoad event handler not working with loadMovie and although I have already posted a fix for the problem (www.actionscripts.org/forums/showthread.php3?threadid=13830), I found this very small and functional fix that does the same thing, a while ago on the Flashcoders Mailing List: http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/htdig/ flashcoders/2002-October/049415.html and so if you see the question, forward people to http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/apache2-default/. Tip #... (more)