I’ve just added a new tutorial, Order of Operations in ActionScript, which covers, unsurprisingly, the order of operations in ActionScript. This includes topics revolving around the object life cycle, frame processing, and events for both Flash Player 9 and Flash…

Have you ever noticed that you don’t have to import any of the native flash classes when writing timeline code in Flash Professional? This is because they’re automatically imported for you in an effort to simply basic timeline code usage.…

One of the best things about Flash Professional (CS4 and those before it) is that you can open it up and immediately start coding with minimal syntactical overhead (class definitions, imports) to get results simply and easily. One of the…

It’s been a while, but I’ve finally added a new tutorial. This one covers what could essentially be threading in AS3 – taking synchronous operations and breaking them up to be executed in segments over multiple frames, primarily for the…

I recently ported (most of) a small to medium sized Flash-based application from ActionScript 3.0 to ActionScript 2.0 – yes, that’s going down not up – and I thought I’d share some insight gained from that experience.…

For the longest time I’ve been using a “go” URL to quickly access the Flex ActionScript 3.0 language reference:http://adobe.com/go/AS3LRThis is a redirect for:http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/index.html… or whatever is the most up-to-date language reference for Flex currently. Only today did I discover there’s…

Here’s a little fun project I did to recreate E4X (ECMAScript for XML) in the context of display objects and display lists. Three classes are involved (technically 2 classes and 1 namespace); E4DisplayList, E4DisplayObject, and e4d_internal. E4DisplayList and E4DisplayObject mirror…

I noticed an interesting consequence of having an incorrectly defined allowNetworking HTML parameter for one of my Flash projects: Full screen stopped working in IE.The problem was that I gave the allowNetworking parameter a value of “always”. Sadly, this is…

If you haven’t noticed, Flash CS4 Professional now supports the use of an External Library Path to reference class definitions in SWC files to be used, but not compiled, in your resulting SWF. What this means is that you can…

Part two of things I didn’t know… And this has been something that has bugged me for years.Have you ever added text through ActionScript to a multi-lined text field created in Flash Professional (Flash Authoring) and frustratingly found that the…

It’s not often I run across something I didn’t know as simple as this. In fact I’m a little embarrassed that I didn’t know this, but it gives me comfort that some other people I talked to also didn’t know.What…

Have you ever been making a code selection in Flex builder and suddenly the selection resets itself, starting over again from the current position of the mouse?This has been KILLING me. But apparently not many people have seen this? Either…

If you’re a Flash/Flex developer, you’ve likely seen those Flash Player error dialogs resulting from unhandled ActionScript errors.These appear when you have the debugger version of Flash Player installed and you run a SWF with errors in the code that…

Alan just posted an interview of me on Fireworks Designer. It focuses in large on my Burnout Paradise™ Paradise City Interactive Locations Map and how Fireworks was used to make it possible.Turns out I haven’t touched the map in what…

I have to say, this is easily one of my favorite Adobe T-Shirts; it shows the selection model in Fireworks. And now (somewhat disappointingly to me, given that I had one of, if not the last of the original batch)…

If you’ve been using Fireworks CS4 with text lately, you may have noticed a little issue where the bounding box of the text will sometimes find itself floating away from the actual, visible text. OK, it doesn’t really “float” but…