Actionscript 3 Designer Toolkit

More design, less programming

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Entries from November 30th, 2009

Getting tweets from Twitter: Tweets Class

November 30th, 2009 · No Comments · AS3 Custom Classes, Apps

Last week I discovered BackTweets.com which allows you to search their database of Twitter links.   BackTweets.com also offers developers access to their Twitter data through an api.  The Tweets Class uses this api to collect a set of data based on a user specified search string.   The data is then displayed with other Designer Toolkit classes [...]

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Drawing a diagonal line-filled rectangle: Diagonals Class

November 27th, 2009 · 1 Comment · AS3 Custom Classes

The Diagonals Class is a simple drawing class for constructing a rectangle filled with parallel diagonal lines. The class can serve as a border or as a textured background.

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Using the Ticker Class for a menu function: Part 2

November 24th, 2009 · No Comments · AS3 Custom Classes

In the previous post, I blocked out a scheme for creating menus with rollover and selected menu item effects. In this post, instances of the Ticker Class replace the rectangles used previously.  Code for playing the mp3’s is also provided.

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Using the Ticker Class for a menu function: Part 1

November 23rd, 2009 · No Comments · AS3 Custom Classes

In three previous posts, the inspiration for the classes presented was the site thru-you.com; the classes were the DottedField, the Ticker and the HTMLTextBG classes.  In this and the following post, I’ll put together a program to duplicate the menus with ticker elements as seen on thru-you.

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Adding a Background to the HTMLText Class: HTMLTextBG Class

November 20th, 2009 · No Comments · AS3 Custom Classes

The HTMLTextBG Class constructs a HTML formatted text field that is centered on a auto-sized colored background with an optional drop shadow. An optional parameter, url, may also be specified which makes the background mouse sensitive and, when clicked, will navigate to the specified url. This allows the class to be used as [...]

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Moving Text: Ticker Class

November 19th, 2009 · 7 Comments · AS3 Custom Classes

The Ticker Class is a news ticker with a variety of user specified settings. In addition to the text displayed, the color, size, regular/bold, background color and rate of movement are all customizable.

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Drawing a dot-filled rectangle: DottedField Class

November 14th, 2009 · 1 Comment · AS3 Custom Classes

The other day I found this site thru-you.com (very cool) that used dashed lines and dotted rectangles as the basis of its design motif. Since, I had already done the DashedLine Class, I decided to do the DottedField Class of which two examples are below.

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Traversing XML and the for each.. Loop

November 12th, 2009 · 2 Comments · Tutorials

This post is an expansion of the November 8 post on getting data stored in a XML file into Actionscript 3 based on the ECMAScript E4X standards.

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Improving the ImageRollover Class, Again: Tweening the Rollover

November 9th, 2009 · No Comments · AS3 Custom Classes

Last night I was reviewing the traffic reports for the site, when I noticed that a visitor had arrived at this site by searching for “flash caurina desaturate”. The phrase gave me the idea that I could improve the earlier ImageRollover class simply by substituting tweened rollovers in place of the abrupt transitions in [...]

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Transferring Data from XML to Actionscript 3

November 8th, 2009 · 4 Comments · Tutorials

In this post, I’ll cover the transfer of data stored in an external XML file into a Flash Actionscript 3 application. In Actionscript 3, handling XML files has been vastly improved – and simplified – with two new classes: the XML and the XMLList classes.

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