Most Popular Scripts | Flash | Tutorials & Tips | Actionscript

Printing something in Flash isn’t really rocket science, but there are a couple of details that will make your job easier as well as improve the quality of the end result. Today you will learn how to print movieclips using PrintJob in AS3 and Adobe Flash.

Learn how to work with ClassPaths and Packages in Adobe Flash Cs5

In this tutorial I’m gonna show you how to create your own Yahoo Weather App in Flash, using AS 3.0 and Adobe Flash.

It’s very useful to work with external files and load them in Flash, using a preloader for example or adding some nice effects. Let’s see how to manipulate a loaded image with BitmapData in AS3 using few lines of code.

Often we need to have different parts of a website talk to each other. This can get tricky when we are using multiple technologies and need the communication in real-time. Going from flash to html is done through javascript on the browser side and in actionscript we use something called ExternalInterface. The ExternalInterface class is an application programming interface that enables straightforward communication between ActionScript and the SWF container– for example, an HTML page with JavaScript or a desktop application that uses Flash Player to display a SWF file. We can send things form actionscript to javascript as well as from the html and javascript into flash and actionscript.

A specific use of drag and drop which is a bit more complicated than your average drag & drop needs is a slider. You can use components, but I usually prefer using my own graphics and code, partly because the components tend to bloat the filesize of the swf and partly because that’s just how I am, I like to make it myself.

I’ve put together this flash to show how to set a movieclip to a certain color, I’ve had to do this at runtime and had to go by different values such as a hex number, rgb values and have even wanted to just set a random color, so this example does them all! It’s even nice for translating a Hexadecimal color into RGB color. Flash uses a Transform object to control certain properties of movie clips. To set color we need to use a Transform object as well as a ColorTransform object. ColorTransform objets are used to, you guessed it, tell the Transform object what color we want to set our clip to. It was a little unintuitive for me to learn, but now it makes sense, or at least enough sense to use.

Allowing users to use the keyboard as well as the mouse is a great way to incite interaction with your flash. This tutorial will show how to code it and what you can do with some keyboard events. This changed with actionscript 3, note this tutorial is AS3. altKey (Boolean) Indicates whether the Alt key is active (true) or inactive (false). charCode (uint) Contains the character code value of the key pressed or released. ctrlKey (Boolean) Indicates whether the Control key is active (true) or inactive (false). keyCode (uint) The key code value of the key pressed or released. KeyboardEvent keyLocation (uint) Indicates the location of the key on the keyboard. KeyboardEvent shiftKey (Boolean) Indicates whether the Shift key modifier is active (true) or inactive (false).

This tutorial / how to / example will show how to get the current url from the browser to flash, and even how to get the query string parameters from the url into actionscript using ExternalInterface.

Many have struggled with the task of getting you swf to read or get the current url showing in the browser, the html page the browser is at which has the swf embedded. Not to be confused with the _root._url which returns the path of the swf file. This would be helpful to know if someone is embedding your swfs on their site, or even customize your swf depending on which page it resides on. There is a pretty simple, yet virtually undocumented way to do this. We have to use javascript by calling External Interface and get the url from the DOM. Window.location.href. Then we must call the toString() function only because ExternalInterface.call requires a function rather than only reading a static property.

Using ExternalInterface.addCallback() we can expose an actionscript function and make it available to javascript. This would be helpful to have your webpage with embedded flash communicate to your flash swf file and even control it with javascript! Say we wanted to have buttons in the html page that would control an object in the flash. Communication is a two-way road so wouldn’t it be great to be able to go the other way as well, you can! That is the main function of ExternalInterface! In this example/tutorial I will explain both directions of communication with flash and javascript!

This is more than just setting the width and height of an object, because that way the image is easily skewed and the natural proportions are messed up. If you want to just use scale you need to know the dimensions of the image being resized, and that’s just not scalable (no pun intended).

Ever wanted to change the dimensions of a flash movie on-the-fly without refreshing the page? If yes, read on the tutorial!

Another remarkable Say Web HD Video Tutorial on AS2. This episode the information panel (score, next and level) boxes are created and prepared for coding.....

Another great, remarkable actionscript tutorial by Say Web tutorial, on how to create a Tetris game in Flash using Actionscript

Read this thoroughly explained, detailed flash lesson and see how to create advanced XML Slide show gallery using the action script code and XML.

The first time I heard about Verlets was about 10 years ago I think, when I was working on a C++ program building a dynamic animated bridge, at that time all documents and resources I found about Verlets were really confusing and at the end I gave up on it (sometimes people explain simple things in the most complicated way). Last year 2009 in flash on the beach (Brighton, UK) when I was attending the session of Keith Peters, he came with some really good ideas about how to implement the “Verlet Integration” in flash using actionscript 3 in a very, very easy way that makes my imagination fly.

This Balloon was an experiment I did playing a bit with Verlet physics (if I can catalogue the Verlet concept as part of physics). Using Verlet can be quite powerful but at the same time is a bit limited due to the simplicity of how physics are applied, we don't have much control of it and for adjusting stiffness between dots we need to do quite much, there are some people out there working a lot with it and making amazing things like this physics engine for action script 3.

Using this thoroughly explained, detailed flash lesson, I will explain to you how to print any document in flash.

In this thoroughly explained, detailed flash lesson, I will show you how to create shape animation using the AS code and mouse cursor.