Articles for February, 2005

Something sort-of old that I just re-found: Kevin Lynch gives an example/code to restore state in Rich Internet Applications.

Have you noticed that the only event in the Button component is “click”? Have you found yourself wanting to listen to the onMouseOver (or some other event) that you know is lurking under the surface somewhere? Never fear, Keith Peters shows us how to access underlying events for components. Nice comment about how to use Macromedia’s mx.events.LowLevelEvents class, too.

Flash and database communication Part 1: Using URL Variables and FlashVars

Posted February 14, 2005 10:56 pm
Filed under: ActionScript, Articles by Paul, Flash, Tutorials

This is the first of a series of articles about how to pull external data (e.g. from a database) into a Flash movie. In this article I’ll explain two techniques that can be used to load data into a Flash movie as soon as it loads, so that the data is available immediately to the movie.

» Keep reading Flash and database communication Part 1: Using URL Variables and FlashVars

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A few months ago I was working on displaying a Flash movie at 100% width and height in a browser window. The biggest problem I ran into was that I wanted to make it so that the movie would scale (shrink/expand) as the user resized their browser window. The problem? In Mozilla/Gecko browsers, the Flash content always got chopped off below 200 pixels of height. I tested this in several browsers on Windows and OS X, and the problem was consistent across platforms with different Gecko browsers (Firefox, Netscape, Camino, etc.). But Safari and Internet Explorer didn’t have that problem.

Today I found an article which describes the CSS necessary to scale a movie to 100% width and height. I will try it out and see if it suffers from the same cutoff-below-200-pixels problem I ran into.

The author, Geoff Stearns, also has another article with javascript code for detecting the Flash Player and embedding the Flash content in an XHTML 1.0 valid way. Two good finds in one site — what a deal!

Flash and database communication Part 0: Introduction

Posted February 4, 2005 8:04 pm
Filed under: ActionScript, Articles by Paul, Flash, Tutorials

(July 2006) Note: Although I unfortunately never finished this series of articles, I did eventually develop tutorials on all these topics as part of a presentation I gave to a user group. For details, see the notes, slides, examples, and recording of the presentation.
I just finished teaching a three-day workshop on ActionScript programming. In the […]

» Keep reading Flash and database communication Part 0: Introduction

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A short but nice article on using Penner tweens, and accessing their events