12 Websites To Help You Learn Flash/ActionScript

Adobe Flash is an excellent technology that allows developers to add
interactivity and smooth animations to web pages. Its popularity is so
immense that you’ll find many websites dedicated to helping developers
interested in Flash.

In this article, you’ll find 12 wonderful websites that’s worth a bookmark if you’re looking into sharpening your Flash development skills. For each entry, you’ll find three tutorials from the website so that you can see what’s in store for you.

1. kirupa.com

kirupa.com is a site that features excellent Flash
tutorials (as well as Silverlight, ASP.net, PHP, and Photoshop). There
are plenty of well-written, detailed tutorials and articles pertaining
to Flash sectioned into seven categories including Basic Drawing, Special Effects, Server-side Flash, and Game Development.

Tutorial examples:

• Simple Page Transitions
• Creating and Animating Clouds
• Falling Text

2. gotoandlearn.com

Some people learn best by visualization and following along with the
instructor step-by-step in real-time. If you’re the type that prefers
to learn by watching instructional videos, check out gotoandlearn.com – a website by Lee Brimelow that offers free Flash video tutorials.

Tutorial examples:

• ActionScript 3 Sound Basics
• Creating 3D Carousels
• Creating Flash Tooltips

3. gotoAndPlay()

gotoAndPlay() is dedicated to providing resources for Flash
game developers. It’s a community that has a forum, interviews from
professional developers, and reviews of books and resources. It also
has tutorials and articles about Flash game development that can be
filtered by topic, expertise, and type.

Tutorial examples:

• Developing a space shooter game
• Skeletal Animations
• How to protect SWFs from decompilers?

4. Adobe - Flash Developer Center

Adobe’s Flash Developer Center is a community for Flash
developers. Here, you’ll find tutorials, articles, and related
resources about Flash. You should also check out the ActionScript Technology Center for articles on specifically about ActionScript.

Tutorial examples:

• Using ActionScript to pause and loop the timeline in Flash
• Drawing with the Pen tool
• Creating a 3D button animation for Flash

5. Flash Kit

Flash Kit is one of the biggest and oldest community
dedicated to Flash development. With over 600,000 members, you won’t
have a hard time finding people with a similar interest in Flash.
There’s a forums section, free resources that you can download and use
in your Flash projects, and a large tutorials section that includes 18
categories.

Tutorial examples:

• Making movieclips point at the mouse
• Move a sprite with the keyboard
• How to use hitTest in a simple game

6. ActionScript.org

ActionScript.org is a site that provides resources and information pertaining to Flash, Flex, and ActionScript. They have a fairly active Forums section as well as an ActionScript Library that currently has over 700 objects you can download.

Tutorial examples:

• Drawing Shapes with AS3
• Simple reflection effect with AS2
• Physics in ActionScript 3.0

7. Flash and Math ActionScript 3 Tutorials

Flash and Math has a great collection of tutorials on AS3.
They cover basic to advanced topics so that Flash developers of any
level can find something they can read and learn from. Many of the
tutorials include the source files for download.

Tutorial examples:

• Drag-and-Drop in Flash CS3
• Tween Tricks in Flash CS3 and ActionScript 3
• Simple 3D Drawing in Flash CS3 and ActionScript 3

8. Flash Tutorials on Pixel2Life

Pixel2Life, according to the site, is the "largest tutorial
index catering to graphic designers, webmasters and programmers". With
over 40,000 indexed tutorials, you’ll find many links to tutorials in
their Flash Tutorials section.

Indexed tutorial examples:

• Creating a Basic Flash Website (AS3 Version)
• Actionscript 3 Timer Class
• Stars animation above the city

9. Flash Perfection

Flash Perfection is a website with a large collection of
Flash tutorials, tips, and tricks from various websites. Flash
Perfection has 23 categories to help you find information more quickly.

Indexed tutorial examples:

• Atmospheric Steam
• Optimizing your Flash SWFs
• Quick and Easy Zoom Effect in Flash

10. metah.ch

metah.ch has some awesome video tutorials on Flash,
ActionScript, Flex, and AIR. Files associated with the tutorials can be
downloaded and used in your own projects.

Tutorial examples:

• Introduction to Loop and Event in AS3
• Connecting AS3 with a Database
• Interaction between AS3 and JavaScript

11. LukaMaras.com

LukaMaras.com offers detailed Flash tutorials and resources designed to help you learn Flash. There’s also a small forums section with over 3,000 registered users where you can discuss anything related to Flash.

Tutorial examples:

1. ActionScript drop-down menus
2. How to make pixel buttons in Flash the easy way.
3. How to make an amazing dynamic image gallery in Flash 8

12. Flashmagazine

Flashmagazine is an online magazine dedicated to Flash news, reviews, information, and resources. The Tutorials section has some excellent tutorials for Flash developers.

Tutorial examples:

• How to make a custom AS3 preloader
• AS3 Photo gallery
• Rollover effect using masks

I hope you found this article useful! Since there’s so many websites
out there dedicated to Flash development, I can’t include them all, so if you didn’t see your favorite – please share it with all of us in the comments.

Source:Six Revisions

Flash EXE Presentation for an Auto-Run CD :: Publising flash file as Fullscreen EXE

Flash EXE Presentation for an Auto-Run CD

Publising flash file as Fullscreen EXE

This
is a nice little tip for those wanting to auto load a full screen flash
presentation from a CD that's been inserted on a Windows machine.

Start by opening your flash movies FLA source file and right clicking on frame 1, then click "Actions" from the menu and insert the following action script into the editor.

fscommand("fullscreen", "true");

This will force your movie into full screen mode when you create it as a executable file.

Now goto File -> Publish Settings on the top menu, this will bring up a box with various ways of publishing your flash movie. Tick the "Windows Executable" section and click publish. If you now go to the folder containing your flash movie you will notice it has also published a new file, this will be the Windows Executable or EXE file you just setup previously.

Creating a CD with Autorun

Now that you have this file you can simply copy this onto a CD and your ready to go. But if you also want this EXE file to auto load when the CD is inserted into the drive you will need to create and copy 1 more additional file onto that CD.

Right click in an empty section of your folder containing the flash EXE and create a new text file .TXT. Open this file and write the following inside the file.

[autorun]
open = yourfilename.exe

Be sure to change "yourfilename.exe" to your new published flash file's name, now choose File -> Save as from the top menu and save this file as Autorun.inf.

(be sure to save as .INF not .TXT) You should now notice your newly saved file in the folder, now copy this new INF file along with the flash EXE file onto a CD and your done.

Technorati Tags: flash Auto run

Flash Actionscript Goodies

Heres a few helpful bits or flash actionscript code to help you on your way with developing dynamic flash content.

Random Number

There are a few ways to generate a random number in flash it all depends on what you need and how your going to do things, heres some examples:
Generate a random number between 0 and 10

variable = Math.random()*10;

Result: variable = 7.967452

Rounding a Random Number

variable = Math.floor(Math.random()*10);

Result: variable = 7

Random Number (Between specific numbers 10-20)

variable = Math.floor(Math.random()*(20-10+1))+10;

Result: variable = 15

For/While Loops

Loops are useful because they allow you to cycle through variables without having to write mountains of code, heres an example of a simple loop for creating many different numbered variables each with a random number.

for (i=0;i<11;i++) {
var tempvar = "variable"+i;
_level0[tempvar] = Math.floor(Math.random()*30);
}

Remember once you define the letter (i) in the loop, it will display the value it has been given, in this example (i++) means that it will add 1 to (i) each time, (<11) means this loop will stop after (i) hits 10. The Output for the above is as follows:

variable1 = 23
variable2 = 17
variable3 = 3
variable4 = 9
variable5 = 22
variable6 = 12
variable7 = 6
variable8 = 9
variable9 = 10
variable10 = 30

Key Listeners

Key Listeners allow you to record the input of keys from the keyboard in flash and allow you to peform actions with keys

First you need to setup your key listener as a function as follows:

KeyListener = new Object();
KeyListener.onKeyDown = function() {
if (Key.getAscii() == 13) { // Code for ENTER key
gotoAndPlay(25);
} else if (Key.getAscii() == 8) { // Code for BACKSPACE key
gotoAndPlay(35);
}
}

Then either after the function or on another frame where you want the key listender to start simply add this code:

Key.addListener(KeyListener);
Technorati Tags: Flash Actionscript Goodies