addEventListener() is one of the most used functions in Actionscript 3. Any AS3 application that allows user interaction will require the use of this function. I won’t explain what it is used for; if you don’t know, this article is not for you.
This article will illustrate the appropriate way to subscribe to events from an object.
My first attempt at developing a Flex application!
CarzDB is a database application that stores information about a die-cast car collection. A good friend of mine has a die-cast car collection and he needed something to catalog his collection for easy reference information. We developed an application a few years ago using VB.NET 2005 for him to use and it worked great. He distributed it freely via the HotWheelsCollectors forum. We received nothing but positive feedback from all the users that downloaded it.
A few months ago we rewrote the entire program using Flex 3 and AIR to develop a cross-platform version with new features. We used the same premise of the original application in that everything possible must be customizable for the end user. Another requirement was that it must be as portable as possible. With our new build, it is more portable than before because the original version required Windows. However, now the application runs on Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux.
Screen Scales is a project that a friend of mine and I created. This is the first free AIR application that we have created. It is a utility that allows you to drag points around the screen and it will calculate the distance between them in pixels (by default).
Although there are a few different screen caliper type of programs, we wanted to create our own so we could make it do exactly what we wanted (and more). The features that we added that may be different from some of the other caliper programs are the ability to have multiple line segments on-screen at once, measure diagonal distances with the ability to see the horizontal and vertical delta measurements, display angle measurements, set a custom scale factor, and others.
If you are interested, you can download it for free by visiting the Screen Scales Project page.
Some day I will get around to posting about some of the things we did to make it work the way we wanted it to.
One of the most common actions to do in a flash movie is reading data from outside sources. There are many different ways and formats for reading data, and we will start with reading from an XML document.
Reading from an XML document provides us with a lot of different abilities. First off, you can modify an XML file easier than a Flash file because you don’t have to recompile it. Second (and more importantly in my opinion), XML files can be the dynamically creating using PHP which means you can pull data directly out of a database.
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The first tutorial will be to create a very simple slide show using Flash and Actionscript 3. I know, there are thousands of these things out there and it would be easier to download one of those and use it, but by building your own you will learn some of the concepts in programming with Actionscript 3.
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