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Archive for the ‘Flash and Actionscript 3’ Category

AS3 DragObject – Dynamic Animation via Destination

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

I’ve been using this DragObject class for a while now. It was just a quick little MovieClip extension I threw together to give any MovieClip I had a destination x and y to automatically animate to. Simply explained, when the destination x and y are changed, the onEnterFrame function makes sure the clip animates to it. Since putting it together, I’ve been very fond of this sort of tweening concept. It allows for dynamic changing of properties without needing to worry about mid-animation changes; with only 1 property determining the destination value, your MovieClip will never get confused or lost as to which way it should be going.

One thing to note is that on the timeline I have set up a globalMouseUp function. This is necessary for implementation of the DragObject if your cursor is able to leave the object when dragging it.

Also added in some fun proximity checking. Source and Enjoy.

-Andrew

Extending the RangeList Class

Monday, February 25th, 2008

This will be quick. I’ve extended the functionality of my RangeList class and made 2 menu systems. The first is what I’m calling a Multi-Set Menu. Which is simply a set of n number of 1-dimensional menus. The example I am providing is a bit crude, but it illustrates the point, this could be put to good use creating a dynamic drop-down menu system of some sort. The second menu is a grid system, not much more explanation needed for that one. The Grid Menu is also a little less crude, and generates a grid dynamically given a class type for the menu items via String. I was hoping to offer the ability to create a grid either dynamically or statically from items on the stage, but without method overloading in AS3 I decided not to come up with an alternative solution, however I simply just commented out the static constructor if you are up for some minor tampering. Also I’m using Tweener for the animation, it is just easier (and pretty efficient).

Click on the example and use the Arrow Keys to see how the menu works.

[kml_flashembed fversion="10.0.0" movie="http://www.andrewwalpole.com/blog/wp-content/docs/MSM_Test.swf" targetclass="flashmovie" publishmethod="static" width="300" height="240"]

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These examples are available for download here.

Comments, Thoughts and Questions always welcomed.

-Andrew

Welcome to my Laboratory

Monday, February 11th, 2008

labs.andrewwalpole.com is up, and although it is nothing more than a few links and some blurry tree thing, it is where I will start to post some of my experiments and projects that don’t quite fit into my portfolio. I’ll give you a brief overview of what is up there right now.


First up is the project that spawned my idea to build my MixBoard AIR application. This is a much simpler version of what the application is today, it loads in a handful of looping mp3 files and allows you to mix them together on the board, pretty simple, instructions are even included.


Second is Commet, a school project I created using AS3, PHP and MySQL. It is my take on a flash-based social network. The entire premise is that you can access all portions of the service by either dragging objects or clicking them. Someday when I have a nice multitouch event system built I’ll spend a few minutes to hook it up to my multitouch screen.


Third is a quick little screensaver idea, I guess I was going for cells under a microscope. It makes extensive use of the Math.random() function and all the graphics are generated through the AS3 drawing API. I would really like to see Adobe pop out a nice little background-running AIR application to run flash-based screensavers – because I’m too busy right now to do it myself.


Finally, I present to you my award-winning widget, the ThumbPlay Ringtone Radio. I built this widget for the ThumbPlay Widget contest put on during FlashForward 2007. Even though my company was planning on forking over the conference money, they were pretty happy when they heard I had won all of my expenses paid, I was pretty stoked as well. If you are wondering why it’s not making any noise, that’s because it seems that ThumbPlay has removed their crossdomain.xml file. Maybe one day I will bug them to stick a new one up there. Total development time from start to finish: 6 hours (4 in Photoshop).


So that is my new laboratory. I’ll be sure to post my updates here and if there is any source code you want to peruse, just ask nicely.


-Andrew