Flash

Ever wonder how you can persist data for a user in your Flash SWF applications? The simple answer is to use a local SharedObject or as it is commonly known the Flash Cookie. These objects are stored to the users local machine much like a cookie with it’s access limited to current domain and optional…

FlashVars are a great way to pass information to your swf. The most common usage is to pass along the root path to use when looking up resources or configuration information. These parameters can then be accessed within your application by the use of ActionScript and are a great way to increase the customization and…

For those of us that have applications that require the uploading of files, our work has just gotten easier. Earlier this month the folks of moxiecode (tinymce) released the first version of their File Uploading tool Plupload. This handy tool enables users to utilize Flash, Silverlight, HTML5, and other web assets for handling and displaying…

The Flint Particle System is an open source flash project with the goal of creating a base framework that is easily extensible by developers to create their own particle behaviors and effects. One of the many features it has is the ability to have your particle emitters move with your mouse. Below you can see…

Today I came across a perplexing issue when working on applying a BlurFilter to a Movie Clip in a Flash Application. When working with a large container object for a scrolling gallery I found that the BlurFilter I was trying to apply was not being rendered. After some testing and research it appears that Bitmaps…

When working with tweens in Flash we often create custom time-line based animations for various elements of the project. These time-line animations can sometimes need to be played in reverse by the frame count and not by a time duration. If one utilizes the TweenLite or TweenMax Tweening Framework this task can easily be completed…

There are often odd cases when in a Flash Application you find that by design you want to call a function but only have the name of the function as a String. This could be caused by various reasons one being that the name is stored in a database as part of some settings. To…

Generating a random number for use in Flash is a common problem that many developers come across. Luckily the Math object provides static methods to help us perform this basic task.  Found below are two snippets of how to generate a random integer from 0 to a max number or for a range of values.…

Array duplication or copying is actually a very simple task with multiple methods of the Array class returning a new Array. The only drawback is that their is no clone, copy, or duplicate method that would make it obvious to first time users. Instead the Array class has the concat and slice function that can…

For those creating dynamic text fields in Flash it often comes as a surprise that dynamic text fields do not behave as expected when modifying the alpha parameter of it or it’s parent. Often even I forget that telling a movie clip to transition out based on a tween of its alpha property doesn’t modify…