StomperNet has been a ‘buzz’.

After Andy’s ‘Mea Culpa‘ why wouldn’t it be…

But this is so much better and bigger, learning many lessons from the last launch – StomperNet strikes again!

Teamed up with Paul Lemberg a new product called FormulaFIVE (F5 for short).

Just launched a video to excite the industry!
So check out stomperf5.com now!

Rich Shupe and Zevan Rosser’s Learning ActionScript 3.0: A Beginner’s Guide.

This book is published by O’Reilly and is part of the Adobe Developer Library.

This book was a great way for me to move into as3. I’m coming from a visual design background with little formal programming training, to know more of my background check my about page. Being mostly self taught, I found myself learning about basic programming skills with this book. This book helped me catch up to the as3 world and I began doing some really cool things in flash once I had a base for understanding all the differences and new things in as3.

I really enjoyed the visual aspects of this book as well. Many of the diagrams and illustrations have the hand drawn look. Like so:




I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to better understand actionscript and actionscrip3 more specifically. It’s a great helper at migrating from as2 to as3. On the cover, it claims to teach “everything needed for non-traditional programmers–web designers, GUI-based Flash developers, those new to Actionscript, visual learners–to understand how Actionscript works and how to use it in everyday projects.” I would agree with that whole-heartedly. All I can say is that after reading it and working through some of the samples included, I better understand AS3 and am confident that through the foundation it has helped me lay I will soon become an actionscript ninja.

Thanks Ryan and Zevan!

I’ve been thinking about this blog and what kind of content I want to be creating for the world and yes, you. I really enjoy creating working tutorials and open source project or components available to download and learn from. I make these available so that you are able to pick it apart and hopefully learn something from it. And in the best of scenarios it helps you solve some problem in one of your own projects, or you contact me and are able to teach me a better way I could have done it (my personal favorite). There are no shortcuts to this kind of stuff. Learning is a process, and the way I learn (especially when it’s related to flash) is to get my hands on something that already works and pick it apart. So that’s what I try to provide in my “tutorials”- I use the term loosely because, they aren’t really walkthroughs per say, but more working examples for you to look into and see how it has to (or at least could) fit together and work. I have really enjoyed the direction I’ve gone with the blog, and to get to my point…

I have also learned a lot of what I know from books. Reading books and understanding the whys to all the ways things are done in actionscript has helped me a lot. It may have been an epiphany, but I thought – why not share the ones that have made the biggest support for me, or at least list the books that sit the closest to my keyboard when I am working through a project.

So books are good. I will be continuing with my tutorials and open source working examples and put up as much code as I can, but I want to also talk about where I learn some of the things I learn.

So if you follow the blog, thanks! You’ll start to see a larger variety in posts. Dare I put this in writing but I’m also trying to increase the frequency of posts. I’ve been pretty good at getting at least one post a week, so I’ll try to bump it up to at least 1 and a half posts a week Go ahead and subscribe to my feed if you want to be sure not to miss any of them, and please jump back to the posts when it’s interesting and let me know, comment with any books that have helped you better understand you specialty.

A preloader bar that gives full stats, speed, kb, and even remaining download time!

Preloader with Stats

Clean slick preloader. Rounded bar with gradient fill and bevel and glow filter. All actionscript driven, no animations to bloat file size. Rounded corners don’t distort as width changes.

Includes loading statistics for download.

Calculates the following:

• Percent Loaded
• Loaded kilobytes
• Total kilobytes
• Average kilobytes per second download speed
• Remaining dowload time in seconds
• Gives kilobytes to 2 decimal places without dropping zero’s

To Use:

Easy to use, just paste in frame 1 of your file. (actionscript code included!)

Customize:

Customize color easily. Edit the fill color of the preloader_bar movie clip in the library.

Customize font easily. Edit the font for the text box named feedback on the text layer of the preloader mc.

Other Circlecube Items at FlashDen

See my previous post about how to do this with as2: Detect Flash Player Version | Actionscript based detection method (as2)

Overview

Recently I had a requirement that I had to detect which version of the flash player was currently installed. This is a normal thing, we do it all the time when embedding flash into html, we detect which version of the player is installed and if the user has an old version they are invited to upgrade…

But what about finding the flash version from within flash? An actionscript based detection method? I hadn’t ever thought about doing that…

Actionscript 3 now uses the flash system capabilities class to report all it’s “capabilities”. First we have to import it and then we have access to all the details through the Capabilities object, such as operating system, language, pixel aspect ration and flash player version. There are a ton of others and I’ve included them in the trace statements.

Steps

1. import the class

   1	import flash.system.Capabilities;

2. read the version from the Capabilities object

   1	var flashPlayerVersion:String = Capabilities.version;

This returns a string, 3 letter operating system, a space, and then the version number as four numbers seperated with commas. (just like eval(‘$version’); in as2)
I display the flashPlayerVersion and to split it out I split the string on the space, and then split the version number with the comma delimiter and display them all.

Example

Here’s what mine is (gif):

And here’s what yours is (swf):

Actionscript (as3)

Download

Here’s the source fla file: flash version detection actionscript method (as3)