Design News & Articles

The InfoBox class creates a pop-up box which can contain an image, a title, a description and a link. It comes in handy in spots where you need to display additional information, but don't have the room, or don't want to dedicate the necessary space. With just a few lines of code, you can add it to any project.

This is a reusable class that you can drop into any project to pop up a word bubble containing some explanatory text, a warning, a reminder, whatever. It works like a tool tip for Flash.

How to create a fullscreen toggle button in AS2 with rollover and rollout effects.

Every web site I design has one common element, and that is a Contact Form of one sort or another. After years of building and rebuilding contact forms, I finally got smart and put together a package with the core features common to every contact form I built. Now I can simply reshape this core into whatever it needs to be for the particular project I'm working on. This approach uses AS Classes. If you are not familiar with using classes, don't run away just yet. It will be a bit foreign to you, but I think you will soon see the advantages to working this way, and, like me, be glad you did.

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 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.

Using regular expressions (RegExp) on a very basic level (Also shows how to use RegExp with variable search terms)

In this article, you will learn how to make your own reusable classes that will enable you to add custom dropdown menus to your Flash projects. You will be able to make the menu and the buttons any size or color you want, using the font of your choice, just by sending the class the information it needs to construct it for you. Best of all, learning the techniques used to put this together will help increase your skills at making custom classes in general, as you start thinking more in terms of "programming for programmers."

When designing in Flash, using a button symbol for an animated button presents several problem. The biggest problem for most designers being, if you put an animation in the roll over state, it'll snap back to the beginning once you roll out. This article will show you one way you can approach animated buttons using a MovieClip and the nextFrame() and prevFrame() methods.

In this article, you will learn a much better, more object oriented way to structure a Flash application than the typical "frames on the main timeline" scheme that you see so often everywhere. This better way might be summed up in a few words as "MovieClips as screens." This is so far superior to "Frames as screens," that I think you will be as amazed as I was, when I line out for you exactly why. Read on!

Mask In Mask in Flash CS4