When working with multiple, nested MovieClips, or dynamic variables, sometimes you need your ActionScript to refer out to other MovieClips, or the main timeline of the swf file. When I was first teaching myself ActionScript, I learned to use _root to reference outside of functions or MovieClips.
It is this point in my learning that see how wrong I was to rely on _root for every outside-the-MovieClip function.
Lately I have been working on a project that has a lot of flash files that use external ActionScript files for similar functions. It helps that they have many of the functions external because you can make mass changes with one file.
For those not in the know, here is how you include an external ActionScript file:
Due to the rise in internet video, and the need for it to be easily played on different operatiing systems and browers, Flash FLVs have taken off in the last two years. In light of this phenomenon, I find myself more and more downloading FLV videos for later viewng.
The most common places you will see FLV video for the masses is of course YouTube and Google Video, but many more sites are catching on. Flash has 98% browser penetration, and works on Mac, PC, and Linux, so it is a no brainer.
At work we use a lot of fake pop-ups in Flash to show information. Everything generally works very well, until we discovered that you can click buttons in flash that are underneath a movieclip or a graphic.
The first solution was to hard code disabling of MovieClips/buttons like so:
Upon redesigning this website, I decided I wanted to do a little more with the front page. The first thing that I wanted to accomplish besides a new look was removing entire posts from the front page and just having short snippets of each post so that there would be less scrolling and a reason to view the entry/comments page.
ExpressionEngine has a built in word limiter function that can be used on template tags that produce words. My immediate problem with using the word limiter is that it would cut off paragraphs without closing the paragraph tag. I also show a lot of code within pre tags and those not being closed screwed up the entire page layout.
Recently, I built a flash website for a customer that required a lot of small, smooth tweens. I have used ActionScript tweening before, but not enough that I knew all of it from memory, so I went about my business experimenting with them. I realized that this situation might come up again, so rather than creating a dummy file every single time, I made a small tween tester app that would give me the code and remind me of how to use it.
I included the full instructions from the flash help file as well as some on how to use the tester. This way, i can simply see how a tween/transition is going to look without even opening flash. It has been a real time saver already.
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