Overview

Color can sometimes make or break your design. I’ve put together this flash to show how to set a movieclip to a certain color, I’ve had to do this at runtime and had to go by different values such as a hex number, rgb values and have even wanted to just set a random color, so this example does them all! It’s even nice for translating a Hexadecimal color into RGB color.

Flash uses a Transform object to control certain properties of movie clips. To set color we need to use a Transform object as well as a ColorTransform object. ColorTransform objets are used to, you guessed it, tell the Transform object what color we want to set our clip to. It was a little unintuitive for me to learn, but now it makes sense, or at least enough sense to use.

I’ve made a function that does all this for you. You just send it the movieClip reference and a color.

There are functions to convert rgb values to a hex value, and from a hex value to red, blue and green values as well.

To make a random hexadecimal number Math.random() * 16777216 (the total number of hexadecimal numbers)

Steps

1. Imports

   1 2	import flash.geom.ColorTransform; import flash.geom.Transform;

2. Make a Transform object

   1	var myTransform:Transform = new Transform(item);

3. Make a ColorTransform object

   1	var myColorTransform:ColorTransform = new ColorTransform();

4. Set the rgb color of the ColorTransfrorm object

   1	myColorTransform.rgb = myColor;

5. Set the colorTransform property of the Transform object to your ColorTransform object

   1	myTransform.colorTransform = myColorTransform;

Flash Color App

Source Actionscript (as2)

Open Source Download

color.zip (containing color.fla and color.swf)

To accompany the last presidential debate, I ask a question:

Who to vote for?

It’s not just about what party you’re affiliated with, who you agree with more on an issue or which candidate you understand better… it’s a combination of them all. It’s more important how a candidate can handle the different issues facing us today than how they perform in a debate or advertisement.
There should be somewhere to assign a weight to each issue on the table and then issue by issue see which candidate I agree more with. Then it would calculate and tell me who I really support according to how I prioritize the issues. So if I think the only issue worth voting about is Iraq or the economy and I agree more with Barrack Obama or John McCain on those issues it will be reflect in the results.
It’s pretty hard to explain the whole idea, without building it myself, so that’s just what I did… while I couldn’t stop thinking about it I coded it.

Check it out, and I hope it helps! Cause we’re gonna need all the help we can get on this one! It can help you decide or just test yourself and see if you really support that candidate as much as you think.

Go try it here!

I pulled info from CNN’s election center mostly because all the info was gathered for me already, each of the big issues, descriptions and the candidates position. I have a slider for each issue where users select how imortant it is to them (on a scale of 0 to 100 percent). Then users compare their own position on the issues with each candidate (on a scale of 0 to 100 toward each candidate). This is all considered while your support is calculated. Each issue’s importance as a percentage is multiplied by the amount you agree with each candidates position. These are all added up and totaled to give a final percentage. This is innovative in that it’s not just who you agree with mpre, it’s who you agree with more on the isues that you think are more important! Let me know what you think about this and let the candidates know what you think about their positions.

Voters Aide the flash app to help you decide who you support by letting you prioritize the issues and choose which candidate you lean towards on each issue and see the overall results.

Here are some screenshots from my example tutorial of integrating Flash with google analytics event tracking showing actionscript to use for event tracking in flash . To get to your Event Tracking Reports (once it is enabled) you just click on the Content section in the nav list and then Event Tracking drilldown will give all details…

The graphic chart report showing events

Numeric event stats

Event Categories and actions with stats

All actions reported for the ‘ball’ category

All labels for category ‘ball’ and action ‘created’.

Enjoy, and let me know if you want more images. Check out the full post with source code here: Event tracking with google analytics flash integration tutorial

Many have read my Integrate Google Analytics with Flash Tutorial in which I express enthusiasm for the new event tracking at google analytics! Well, it’s been a while, but I was admitted to the Beta testing group! So I’ve now had the chance to play with event tracking a bit and wanted to publish my findings!

Overview

Almost a year ago Google Analytics announced their new event tracking model and have had help documents published and code samples up. And as with many of Google’s products the beta stamp has lasted a very very long time. Many have seen my earlier tutorial exploring using traditional Google Analytics Tracking from within Flash, and it does wonders to track your flash apps in this manner, but there is a problem with it. We’re using supposed object oriented concepts to track objects as pageviews. One thing is it really isn’t a very intuitive way to represent that data, and another it inflates your pageviews! The solution? the long awaited and announced Event Tracking model. I’ve been itching for this to be released so I could refresh my analytic tactics I use in my flash projects. No, to answer your questions, it has not been released yet, but I contacted Google and explained that I would be a great beta tester for this feature and after a bit of correspondence they invited me to join in the beta testing! This is good news for you too! Because I will tell you all about how to do it and even show you what the reporting looks like and when it is released finally, you will know what you’re in for after this sneak peak!

UPDATE: Here are the reports for this very example: Report from Event Tracking with Flash Tutorial

The very quick summary is this:

Note that the _trackEvent function is called on the pageTracker object itself. (initially Google had you instantiate a separate event tracker for every object (or category) you wanted tracked)

For example, if we want to track a ball. All the actions that can apply to the ball are: it being created, dragged, dropped, bounced, deleted… You get the idea. We can have direct user actions tracked or even automatic actions. If we have gravity and physics running, the ball may bounce a lot without any direct user interaction. But it will never be dragged or dropped without direct interaction. I’d recommend only tracking user interactions because who cares how often a ball bounces on your page (unless you’re doing an experiment, of course), want we want to know is how and when a user interacts with the ball.

category:string (required)

This is the name of the object you are tracking.

action:string (required)

This is the action that happens to your object you want to track.

optional_label:string (optional)

This can be more information to accompany the action.

optional_value:integer (optional)

A number to provide numerical information to accompany the action.

Steps

1. First, I’d recommend reading up about Event Tracking at Google
2. Decide your object oriented structure for tracking events. What objects do you want to track and what useful information do you want to get through tracking user interaction?
3. Make sure you have the new Google analytics tracking code on your page
4. Use these functions to communicate Google Analytics from your flash
   1. Call the main function with the specified parameters
   2. It will call the appropriate function and send the data to your pageTracker object through javascript with externalInterface calls
5. See the reports in your analytics profile! (if your a beta tester, or else, wait until it is released)

Source code

The tracking functions are below, I enhanced the earlier trackGA function I wrote about. Now you call trackGA with 2 required parameters, categoryOrPageTrack and action. categoryOrPageTrack is where you have to pay attention. I wanted to keep the ability to track pageviews as well as have event tracking, so as the first param you either send in the string ‘page’ to explicitly state that you want to track the page view, or you send in another string to state you want to track an event on that specified object. Action remains the same, the action you want tracked (either on the pageview, it is the path that will appear in your reports; or the event tracking will be the action tracked to the category)…
So to track a pageview I call

and to track an event to an object I call ball:

The trackGA function will rout your call to the appropriate place and send the info to Google through either the trackGAPage function or the trackGAEvent function.

Here’s the actionscript lines where I call the trackGA function:

Example

View example in it’s own html page, I even added a couple html buttons with javascript hooked in to show javascript event tracking implementation.

Download

Download Source

Concerns

I’ve noticed while putting this together that the calls to google analytics are not completely fullfilled, this example sends out correct calls to javascript, but (in firefox at least) a max of about 1 tracking call is registered with the tracking code every 5 seconds or so. I noticed this as I was monitoring the drag and drop events for each ball, although the drag and drop events are both fired, usually the drag event was received and the drop is not. After verifying that my code was consistent, I noticed that no matter how fast I interacted with the objects, the calls were much slower. I’m guessing this is a limit placed by the google team to keep us from sending pointless data such as is posted at the bottom of the event tracking implementation guide, titled Events Per Session Limit.

I’ve had a couple inquiries about how to do a simple preloader in Flash. The technique and also the actionscript which implements the technique. So here is a percentage preloader example with source code and a source file to play with.

Overview

So the idea of a preloader is to hold the swf until the file has sufficiently loaded. Once it’s is fully loaded, then the preloader advances to swf to the actual content.

There are different types of preloaders: status preloaders and percentage preloaders. Status preloaders only tell you the status of the loading file. So it will have a simple looping animation like a spinning wheel and you just wait until it is fully loaded. Percentage preloaders will actually tell you how much has been loaded or how much is left and usually will have a bar or something that fills as the file loads or at least tell you in numbers how much has been loaded.

These techniques require the same first few steps. As you can guess, the percentage preloader takes a couple extra steps, but it is much worth the extra few minutes in my opinion. It gives the users valuable information about the program or file they are waiting on. If they are waiting and have no idea how much longer their wait will be, who knows how long they will stick around and watch an hourglass.

In actionscript the only special methods we use for a preloader are getBytesLoaded and getBytesTotal. Once we know the bytes loaded and the total bytes to load, with a little math we calculate what percentage is loaded.

Steps

• Hold the viewers at frame 1
• Check if file is loaded yet (percentLoaded)
• If not loaded, update display (if applicable) and check again
• If loaded, continue

Example

This is a preview, note that it is not actually a preloader, just what one looks like. You can see this preloader working in my Interactive Image Viewer…

Actionscript

I’ve put this code on the preloader movieclip which sits alone on frame one with a simple stop(); actionscript command. Frame 2 contains the beginnings of the actual content. To break down the code, we first see that it is performed every frame: onClipEvent(enterFrame), so every frame we will see how much has loaded. In this case the frame rate is 20 frames per second, so we check the amount loaded every 20th of a second!
First we find the percentLoaded by dividing the total bytes to load by the number of bytes currently loaded. Then we display the percent loaded in a text box named feedback and adjust the xscale of the orange bar according to percentLoaded. Finally we’ll check to see if the percentLoaded has reached 100 yet, and if it has we play the parent clip (which in this case is the root, but it could be used to load numerous objects on the stage). When we play the parent clip, we then go to frame 2 or the actual content of the swf and this preloader is removed from the stage and the code will stop executing. But if percentLoaded is not 100% yet this frame is repeated and the code executes all over again, finding the (hopefully) new number of bytes loaded, and updating the display to inform the user. The code executes so fast that the preloader will actually animate the loading process and inform the user simultaneously.

Download

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