It should come as no surprise that you can use TLF text as a button to kick off an event in your movie. For example, you could have a text block on the stage that talks about a visit to Times Square in New York, and when the user clicks the phrase Times Square, a photo appears on the stage. In this example, you are going to click some text, and a yellow star you will create on the stage starts spinning.

The following is an exercise from Foundation Flash CS5 For Designers by Tom Green & Tiago Dias.
 
If you’re feeling lucky, enter the Activetuts+ competition to win 1 of 3 signed copies! (Of course, you can always purchase one from FriendsOfEd..)

Step 1: New Document
Open a new Flash ActionScript 3.0 document, and save it as TLF_eventLink_AS.fla. Change the name of Layer 1 to Star, and add a…

In this tutorial we will be looking at how to incorporate HTML and CSS in Actionscript 3.0.

I recommend you familiarize yourself with is AS3 Event Handling and Loaders, if you haven’t already, because we are going to load our data from external sources.

Plenty has been happening in the world of Tuts+ Premium lately, so let’s keep the ball rolling with another cracking tutorial exclusively available to Premium members. Here’s a brilliantly entertaining AS3 game tut, courtesy of Carlos Yanez.

Take a look at (and play around with) the final result we will be working towards:

This Premium Tutorial is Packed with Design and Development Tips
Using the Flash Tools we’ll create good looking graphics that will be powered by several ActionScript 3 classes like MouseCursor, Tween Nano, Sprite, Timers and other Events.
The user will be able to input a player’s name and destroy a predefined number of dartboards before the game ends.

Professional and Detailed Instructions Inside
Premium members can Log in and Download! Otherwise, Join Now! Below are some sample images from this tutorial.

Active Premium Membership
We run a Premium membership system which costs $9 a month (or $22…

Few months ago I’ve been working in a project where I had to validate poker hands (based on 5 cards) and also calculate what the chance is for all possible hands depending on their rank from highest card to straight flush and then show percentages for each possible future hand type.
Well, it looked to me a bit simple before starting but once I took a quick look on the web and I started building up the logic of it, I just realized that it is something really, really complicated. A poker hand of 5 cards can have lots of different combinations which mean that it might need lots of validations and conditions depending on each hand rank (I’m not speaking about few, it may be more than hundreds).

Silverlight lays out user interface elements in Panels with various capabilities ranging from fixed, pixel-based layout through to flexible, fluid designs. You can make use of the existing layout mechanisms or build your own Panels to supplement what’s available. Let’s take a look at what’s involved..

In this video, we’ll examine the Panels available and the various properties around alignment and sizing that come into play when you’re laying out elements for Silverlight UI.

What’s Covered?
Here’s a quick look at some of the subjects covered in this screencast:

Element properties
Panel types
Dragging and dropping
Fixed and fluid layouts

View Screencast

Don’t like ads? Download the screencast, or subscribe to Activetuts+ screencasts via iTunes!

Useful Links
Mike Taulty Microsoft (UK): http://mtaulty.com: mtaulty@microsoft.com: twitter.com/mtaulty

An Introduction to Microsoft Silverlight 4
Visual Studio (Express Edition)
Silverlight 4 Tooling
Expression Blend 4

A lot has changed between how text was handled in Flash CS4 and Flash CS5. We think now is a good time to pull up a stool, sit down, and review, in very broad terms, what one needs to know about TLF before “wiring up” an exercise or project using ActionScript.

The following is an exercise from Foundation Flash CS5 For Designers by Tom Green & Tiago Dias.
 
If you’re feeling lucky, enter the Activetuts+ competition to win one of 3 signed copies! (Of course, you can always purchase a copy..)

Introduction
With the new TextLayoutFramework (TLF), text is found in these things called containers. They either can be physically drawn on the stage using the Text tool and given an instance name or, as is more common, can be created at runtime. You also know that the text can be formatted and manipulated using the Properties panel. The neat…

We’ve been having a lot of fun here at flashandmath with surfaces made of particles.
So we present the Stanford Bunny and other new beautiful surfaces with modification
of earlier effects, a significant optimization of the code, and a simple z-sorting
method. The optimized code allows for revolving in 3D over 200,000 particles.

Things are going to be pretty unresponsive around here (more than usual) for the next week as I’m taking some time off to recharge the batteries. After I return things will be picking up rapidly as we enter the new conference season. Here are some upcoming things that are going on over the next few months. There is lots of exciting new stuff that I can’t wait to start talking about.
Intel Developer Forum · San Francisco · Sep 13 – 15
My first conference back will be the Intel Developer Forum taking place at Moscone Center in San Francisco. Adobe and Intel have partnered for the Melrose project that presents an excellent way for developers to monetize their AIR applications targeted at netbooks. I will be presenting on Adobe’s multi-screen vision.
Flash on the Beach · Brighton · Sep 26 – 29
I am really starting to get amped up for…

This tutorial will cover implementation of the AS3XLS ActionScript 3.0 library for the Flex framework. We will demonstrate loading an Excel .xls file into Flash and parsing the data into a Flex datagrid.

View Screencast

Don’t like ads? Download the screencast, or subscribe to Activetuts+ screencasts via iTunes!

The Wall Street Journal recently put out an article describing how the demand for Flash developers has been increasing as of late. While this is no surprise to most of us in the community, it is a refreshing reminder that those who have marked Flash as a dying technology are quite wrong indeed. The article states that the increase in online Flash gaming is a large reason for the spike. I’m guessing that it also has something to do with all of the anticipation surrounding Flash on mobile devices.
The article also includes a quote about the salaries that top Flash developers are getting these days:
Top full-time Flash engineers can now command more than $150,000 a year in salary, says Stuart Liroff, a headhunter at GreeneSearch recruiting firm. That compares with $50,000 to $80,000 a year three years ago.
I’m sure a lot of you are now running to…

In this two-part Active Premium tutorial we’ll be building a top-down war game from scratch. Creating a game is definitely one of the most involved tasks in the world of programming and my mission here is to help Premium members make this process a little bit easier.
We run a Premium membership system for $9 a month (or $22 for 3 months!) which gives members access to extra tutorials, like this one! You’ll also get access to all other Premium content (Psd Premium, Net Premium etc.) and whilst logged in, your favorite Tuts+ sites are all completely ad-free!

This Premium Tutorial is Filled with Creative Tips
Our war game will implement many different concepts from building a background based on xml data to breaking colors into separate channels using bitwise operators. The game itself will not be like some MMORPG (it would probably take several volumes of a book to describe…

Yesterday, I started coding a Flex 4 application for an event in November. Being fed up with the classic Flex 4 progress bars, I decided to create a custom one using Flash CS5 and Flash Builder 4. I was surprised by the lack of tutorials on this topic, so that’s why I’m writing this post today. First, I need to mention this excellent tutorial written by Seth. It’s the only sample I’ve found so far that uses a Flash CS file to customize the user experience. My custom preloader is inspired by this tutorial. The tricky part of this development was to understand correctly the behavior of the Flash Player while loading a Flex 4 application. First, the Flash Player loads the SWF application file (e.g. main.swf). As it discovers that it’s a Flex 4 application, it needs to download the RSLs of the appropriate framework. Framework RSLs come in…

XAML is a key part of Silverlight development – it allows you to declaratively define your user interface and it makes it easy for tools such as Visual Studio and Expression Blend to share that UI definition. In this video we take a look at some of the key features of XAML that you’ll encounter whilst working with Silverlight and also a little around how XAML ‘works’ in your Silverlight applications.

What’s Covered?
Here’s a quick breakdown of what’s covered in this screencast:

The alternative to XAML
Anatomy of a XAML document
Visual Studio design and code views
Naming and accessing elements
Element properties
XML namespaces
Custom types within XAML
Resource dictionaries

View Screencast

Don’t like ads? Download the screencast, or subscribe to Activetuts+ screencasts via iTunes!

Useful Links
Mike Taulty Microsoft (UK): http://mtaulty.com: mtaulty@microsoft.com: twitter.com/mtaulty

An Introduction to Microsoft Silverlight 4
Visual Studio (Express Edition)
Silverlight 4 Tooling
Expression Blend…

I often get ideas for things to build but don’t have the time to actually see them through. Recently I came across an API for accessing the Android Marketplace that was written in Java. Google has no official API for this as you are supposed to only be able to access it from your device. The idea was to build an AIR application that would allow you to search and browse on the market. There are many websites out there that do it but they are messy and riddled with ads. This would be clean, fast, and could include advanced features like directly connecting to your device.
I started by trying to port it directly to AS3. This was going great until I had to set a cookie header with the authentication details when querying the market. This is not allowed in ActionScript and I could find no workaround. A proxy…

Written by Bear Travis + Tara Feener exclusively for WebDesignDev.com.
Tara and Bear are both members of the Flash Catalyst development team at Adobe, and, along with Matthew Cannizzoro, author the FlashCats blog (flashcats.net)

First things first: we think it’s easiest to learn by example. So to introduce you to using Adobe® Flash® Catalyst™CS5, the newest member of the Adobe Creative Suite® family, we’ll quickly, (and we mean very quickly), show you how to create an interactive video gallery without writing any code.
What is Flash Catalyst? It’s the new interaction design tool from Adobe that lets you take your static Illustrator, Photoshop, and Fireworks artwork to expressive projects with interaction, audio, video, and animation.
Let’s start our project in Illustrator CS5. Although Flash Catalyst provides a panel of drawing tools, it’s not meant to trump its co-suite products with their fine-tuned array of advanced drawing tools. As a warning,…

This tutorial will show how to create a light reflection effect. It uses some image for background and vector based reflection of the light.

Welcome to Part 2 of my Beginner’s Guide to Augmented Reality, I hope you finished off the first part of this tutorial, or at least downloaded and read the source files (otherwise you may get a bit confused with what’s going on).

Quick Recap
Last time we looked at setting up a simple AR environment, creating a cube, applying materials to the cube and the “hole in the wall” effect.
Today we will be building on that knowledge and creating the final as shown in the demo. To create that final effect, we need to know how to render spheres, animate objects, play sound effects and finally, render 3d objects. Rendering 3D objects in the palm of your hand is the main reason why Augmented Reality has become a big hit this year, especially when you create some of the more interesting shapes or animate them. If you are in…

Curiously, pixel particles that are behind most particle
effects are not display objects. In this tutorial we explain
the nature of pixel particles. We give a simple example that
shows how to create and move particles and how to make them
leave shadowy trails. Our example handles comfortably as many
as 200,000 particles.

This tutorial will teach you an easy method for displaying Google Maps inside you Flash projects using ActionScript 3.0. Read it here.