I’ve taken the big jump and moved across several ponds to New Zealand! Not only does this mean lots of freelancing on small projects and hiding from the daily rainstorms in Internet cafés in beautiful but wet Auckland, it also means I once again have time to write my blog!

Hello Kiwis!

I’ve had to answer this at least three times in the last month so I’m assuming it’s a useful piece of code.

When creating liquid interfaces in ActionScript 2 you simply let your object listen to the stage for changes, like so:

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Stage.addListener(this);
 
...
 
private function onResize() {
   this.mc_background._y = Stage.height
}

In ActionScript 3 the stage is accessible as a property in all classes inheriting from DisplayObject. Useful, but here is where the trouble begins for most people. If you…

So, last time we looked at how to run an objects constructor to create a duplicate – which is what Adobe recommends as a replacement for duplicateMovieClip.

The problem is that even tho this solves a majority of the situations it does not let us copy an Objects state (such as a Display Objects position, graphics property or the content of an Array).

Flash copies primitive data types such as String and Int when they are assigned to a variable:

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var…

Copying a Movie Clip in ActionScript 3. Can’t be done. Right? Wrong.

Well, duplicateMovieClip is certainly gone, but there are still ways of making copies – running an objects constructor for example.

The basic way of doing this (which you no doubt know) is running the constructor of an object directly:

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private var _circle = new customCircleClass
 
// "copy"
 
private var _circle2 = new customCircleClass

This, however, requires you to know the name of the constructor you are running. In many cases…

I guess I should apologize for the agonizingly slow pace at with I update. It’s not to do with malice, I’m just swamped with freelance work and it eats away at the little free time I have to write in. It’s a pleasant problem, though; the demand for Flash developers is higher than ever.

Next week I’ll be writing two more articles on the principles of animation, and after that I’ll try to go a little deeper and touch upon…

There are more than a few tricks to animating in Flash, and a lot of them has to do with character design and how to make Flash do the animating for you. But some have to do with the way you handle frames.

The traditional approach when animating is to draw the most important keyframes first. These would be the start of the animation, important turning points and of course how it all ends. When this is done one of your…

One of the biggest problems with animation in Flash is that it’s so easy to cheat. You’ve got motion tweens and shape tweens and timeline effects and the Spaghetti Monster knows what else that all books on Flash demonstrates as “how you animate in Flash”. But these things are just tools; little helpers to speed up work, the bulk of animation (and especially character animation) has to happen with your hands, drawing till you…

First of all, thanks to everyone who has taken the time to visit this page and write to me. There aren’t many large development teams where there is more than one Flash expert – the one I’m on is no exception – so I take any chance I can get to get to know colleagues around the world.

I know it says on the front page that this site is about development as well as animation, but I’m still working…

There are obviously a lot more to drawing cartoons than what I wrote in my last tutorial, 9 tips for drawing in flash, but it was a good place to start. Today I thought we might go deeper in and even approach animation a little.

Before we even consider starting to animate I would like to give you a few tips. Most of the animation made in Flash is incredibly bad, and this is not only due to lazy animators.…

Drawing has always been a well hidden non-talent of mine but every now and then comes a project that requires me to face my demons. Using a mouse to draw is a new experience and if you are not familiar with programs like Illustrator and don’t own a Wacom board Flash is a very easy place to start learning. I will use a popular cat gone bad to demonstrate some of the tricks I use to get around my lack…