(Please open the article to see the flash file or player.)

As you can see, not performing as advertised! It seems the only even it captures is MouseUpSomwhere, and that fires when you roll out of the window? Very weird. I thought maybe it was an issue with being trapped in a browser window, so I threw the same code into an AIR application, and same thing- only event fired was MouseUpSomewhere. I don’t know if this is a bug (seems to be since mouseUp isn’t really occuring, its more of a RollOverSomewhere), or I’m just misunderstanding the functionality of this event, but in either case, it was certainly a letdown to see I was still pretty much trapped within my tiny SWF prison.

Use: Click to create a node. Click and drag nodes to move them around.

A while ago I made a post about FileReference in AS2. For a recent project I needed to create a simple uploader class which uploads files to a given server from flash, so once again I was face to face with FileReference, but this time in AS3. The syntax is almost identical, with a few small nuances. Ill let you download the source** to get the full details.

This example has some a few small frills, my favorite of which is the constructor takes a directory name where you would like the file to be uploaded (relative to the upload script), this allows me to reuse this class for many different uploads, to different directories.

** Note: For this to work you need to put “upload.php” on your server and point the variable ‘phpUploadScript’ in FileUploader.as on line 20 to upload.php.

Life has been a little crazy balancing taking so many credit hours [20], wrapping up my final quarter at RIT, my day job, TCBN, and keeping my blog up to date but its almost 1am and I finally have time to post!

I found these pretty cool “load test” flash movies [a while ago] that serve as an awesome example of how much more efficient actionscript 3 is over actionscript 2. I am currently a huge AS2 junkie, but with my recent coursework in Flex and current project in AS3 based flash, I am getting more and more fond of it. There are some differences from AS2, don’t expect a point and click transition from one version of actionscript to the other. If you are familiar with object-oriented design in AS2 the move is nearly painless (off the top of my head: Document class, event handlers, and * var type [yes, *]).

Flash is here to stay, and it’s good to see that the language that powers it is maturing as well.

* Only run one load test at a time for accurate results

I recently took a course in Rich Internet Application development which focused on the snazzy new Adobe Flex 2 (now Flex 3) platform. This was an amazing course because Flex is being hyped up as the next big thing in RIA development because it runs in the highly pervasive Flash Player plugin (booyah silverlight!). The structure for the course was a rigorous 10week development session in which we would conceive, design, and develop a Flex application and integrate it with some type of stateful data storage.

As usual I wanted to develop something useful, and something that would allow me to integrate Flex with a technology that would be used in the real world- so I opted to integrate it with PHP and MYSQL. Even though this part of it wasn’t required, I felt it really made the experience that much more useful.

Check it out: Flex Course Manager

Responsibilities: All design, development, and backend