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Website designed and implemented for American Program Bureau. Integartes flash content and video with html, all styled with css. Mock-up designed and approved with photoshop; built and implemented with dreamweaver (html/css) and flash. Visit the live site at American Program Bureau.

APB are the guys who organize public speakers, whoever you saw speaking at the last graduation or other ceremony was probably done through the American Program Bureau. They have connections! Many many people, from movie stars, to famous writers, to nobel peace prize winers! So for your next party, give them a try. They had a really old website from about 1999 or so. I was involved with rebuilding it! I did most of the html/css design and flash/actionscript. They just launched the site this week, so I’m just celebrating with this post!

See before and after images below:

Old:

The original site was hard to navigate and horrible to look at…

Vs

New:

These are the mock ups, all html/css and the we pushed it into drupal for content management.
APB had the final say on the finishing touches. It came together, although I was suprised that they opted to put so much movement on the page. We set it all up so all speakers have images and videos on their page all in the custom player we built for them… but then they go and embed a youtube video on their homepage… go figure. It came a long way though. Go Web 2.0! Visit American Program Bureau.

Overview

Allowing users to use the keyboard as well as the mouse is a great way to incite interaction with your flash. This tutorial will show how to code it and what you can do with some keyboard events. This changed with actionscript 3, note this tutorial is AS3.
altKeY (Boolean) Indicates whether the Alt key is active (true) or inactive (false).
charCode (uint) Contains the character code value of the key pressed or released.
ctrlKey (Boolean) Indicates whether the Control key is active (true) or inactive (false).
keyCode (uint) The key code value of the key pressed or released. KeyboardEvent
keyLocation (uint) Indicates the location of the key on the keyboard. KeyboardEvent
shiftKey (Boolean) Indicates whether the Shift key modifier is active (true) or inactive (false).

Steps

1. import KeyboardEvent,

   import flash.events.KeyboardEvent;

2. assign any keycodes

   //keycodes
   var left:uint = 37;
   var up:uint = 38;
   var right:uint = 39;
   var down:uint = 40;

3. add event listener KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN

   stage.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN,keyDownListener);

4. respond to keys

   function keyDownListener(e:KeyboardEvent) {
           trace(e.keyCode.toString());
   }

   or

   function keyDownListener(e:KeyboardEvent) {
           if (e.keyCode==left){
   		ship.x-=10;
   		ship.rotation = 90;
   	}
   	if (e.keyCode==up){
   		ship.y-=10;
   		ship.rotation = 180;
   	}
   	if (e.keyCode==right){
   		ship.x+=10;
   		ship.rotation = 270;
   	}
   	if (e.keyCode==down){
   		ship.y+=10;
   		ship.rotation = 0;
   	}
   }

Example

Here we have a swf with the keyboard event listener on the stage, and feedback boxes to give us all we can know about the event. It will tell us about certain keys (alt, ctrl (cmd), and shift) with a Boolean, it will tell us the keyCode and the charCode. The keyCode is the number that is tied to the actual button pressed or key, and the charCode relates to the character represented by the button(s) pressed. So hitting ‘s’ and then hitting ‘shift + s’ will tell you different charCodes, ‘s’ and ‘S’. but you’ll see that the s key has the same keyCode (you’ll also see the ‘shift’ keyCode as well). If needed you can use the String.fromCharCode function to determine what the charCode for something is. The location on the keyboard is even reported, this helps distinguish between the left shift and the right shift and even the numbers across the qwerty and the numpad on the right of the screen.

Actionscript

Download

source file download: key-listener.fla

Ryan has announced a contest to investigate how Google is actually crawling swfs. He introduced the term “fleximagically searchable” to be included in external content, which is then loaded into the Flex swf. Hoping that google will read the external source file through the swf. Also testing how this shows up in the search results. Even though I think there a lot more to SEO than just letting Google crawl your site, there’s the pagerank and everything that Google uses in it’s top secret algorithm to determine search result position ranks.

Here’s the official rules:

• It has to be a Flex application
• ‘Fleximagically Searchable’ must be dynamically loaded. It can’t be static text inside of your application. – But I don’t care how you load it, in fact that might make a difference in how Google ranks you.
• The first link must be deep linked directly into where you load ‘Fleximagically Searchable’ into your application. Feel free to use any deep linking methods out there.
• Nothing in your code can dynamically load the phrase automatically. It has to be the result of a user interaction.
• You must provide source code and be willing to talk about exactly what you did.
• Multiple entries are allowed if you want to try different things.

They seem to be a bit vague in places, but we’ll see if Ryan decides to clarify anything.

More information: I’ve found that’s helpful at Peter Elst’s post. And Ryan explains Google and Flash’s relationship development here. Here and here is what Google has officially said. Here is the official press release from Adobe about their new

I’ll have a couple entries I’m sure… and I’ll be sure to post about those as well.