I’ve re-purposed an old project of mine, the interactive pog portfolio viewer, to FlashDen. I call it the pog portfolio because each work is represented by a circle, or pog, and you play ith it in the “bay” with different interactive physics configurations. When you click a pog you can view a close up image of that item and more details. The whole file has been cleaned up (code and graphics) and documented for easy customizations.It is a small file size as well, under 36kb swf!

This is mainly an image viewer, stay tuned for any updates, like video support etc.

INTERACTIVE IMAGE VIEWER WITH PHYSICS AND ANIMATION EXAMPLE!

View Details here at FlashDen

Works and configuration loaded in through a single xml file. Select works from the bay to view title, description image and a link (if applicable). Organize works with the tags or select all and choose the physics of the bay for interactivity control (gravity, spring, grid and friction).

It is fully customizable and fully driven by xml. The xml file contains values for configuring the swf, and also all the information about each work to be included in the portfolio.

Each work is loaded into the “bay�? as a round thumbnail or “pog�?. These pogs are animated with the interaction options (gravity, friction, spring and grid). The pogs are sortable by tags (parsed in from the xml).

The whole color scheme of the image viewer is configurable, or can even be set to random! Have a different color scheme every time your image viewer loads!

Clicking a pog in the interactive bay sends that thumb to the holding area and loads the close up into the focus window for that work. It also loads the details about that work into the detail box (to the right of the focus box). Each works needs a 50×50 thumbnail and a close up (max 375px x 270px) image. Focus images are all loaded in with an informative preloader and fade is once loaded.

Site easily integrates with Google Analytics to track user interactions within this flash portfolio!

All works in the portfolio are passed in through an external xml file, here is a sample work node from xml:

Download source at FlashDen

Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

Circlecube Files on FlashDen

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:

Often I’ve had some dynamically created movieclip and then wanted to reference it in my code. This is hard to do if it is named dynamically as well, such as with an incrementing variable. If you use one (or more) variable to name an instance in run time, you can’t always know what it will be called.
There are two ways (that I know of) to reference these clips, one is the array operator [] and the other is using the eval() function is as2 (but I’ve noticed that as3 has removed the eval function, so I’d recommend getting used to array notation).

Steps:

1. Create the object dynamically (or with a variable) (_root.myClip.duplicateMovieClip (“myClip”+i, i);)
2. Reference it with either array notation or with eval. (thisOne = _root["myClip"+i];) or (eval(“myClip” + i))

Example:

I create some movie clips dynamically using a for loop and name them all incrementally with a variable (myClip+i). But then i want to refer to some of them later, specifically. I don’t know what they are named though. They are all myClip1 myClip2 myClip3 and so on. I can use array notation to reference these (or eval). I’ve found it’s easiest to create a reference to the name once and then use it to refer to the clip I want. I imagined a scenario that when you click a mc you would want a different one to be moved. So clicking myClip3 moves myClip4 and so on. I’ve made it wrap so that 5 moves 1… They change the _y property of the next to match the one that’s clicked. Clicking the refresh button will loop through all the clips and (this time using eval) randomize the y coordinate.

Actionscript:

Download:

Source fla file: download

Reference:

Nuno Mira shows a good example:

TheCanadian@Kirupa states it nicely:
The Problem
How can I reference objects using a variable? This is commonly a problem with dynamically created buttons:

for(i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
button+i.someProp = "Hello World!"; //error
}

The Answer
This is probably the question that gets asked the most. Referencing an object with a variable is done using something called associative array referencing or array notation. The fundamental concept behind this is that:

myObject.prop = "value";
//and
myObject["prop"] = "value";

Are the same thing. Associative array referencing follows the pattern of scope["prop"] where scope is the object which contains the property and prop is the name of the property you wish to reference. Save appearance, array notation works in exactly the same way as dot notation.

Going back to the original, problematic, example, the correct code would look like this:

for(i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
this["button"+i].someProp = "Hello World!";
}

The button string is concatenated (joined) with the i variable, forming a new reference with each iteration of the loop. First button0, then button1, et cetera.

That’s the quick, but some of you may think that that’s the same notation that is used with instances of the Array class. While that is true, the converse is actually more correct: Array instances use that notation.

Arrays are exactly the same as generic Objects, the only difference is that they have a collection of methods to deal with their properties. And because they require a need for organization, they typically only use numerical properties. Given the array myArray = ["a", "b", "c"], you could theoretically reference the indices using myArray.0, myArray.1 and myArray.2. The reason that we must use array notation is because the compiler doesn’t allow the reference of numerical properties with dot notation.

Overview

Having things drift around or move randomly has always interested me. Having an animation that is never going to be the exact same thing is very exciting. The focus turns from key-ing exact animations to programming a feel and letting the animations take car of themselves! One type of seemingly random motion is Brownian motion. This gives the movement a random walk wandering look, it will just drift around with no real direction.

Steps

Step by step this process is very simple. In every random motion you create the random number, and apply it to the property. If you want constant random action (motion) rather than just random placement, you repeat that over and over.

1. Make a random number (random velocity)
2. Apply the random number (apply velocity to property)
3. Repeat (if needed)

To create a random number in actionscript, use Math.random(), which creates a random number between 0 and 1. Usually you’ll want to scale it to a range you want to use. If you want a number between 50 and 100, you’d do Math.random() * 50 + 50. *50 to scale it to 0-50, and + 50 to bring it up to 50 – 100. Also if we want to get a 100 range around 0 (-50 – 50) we would do Math.random() * 100 – 50. In the code below I’ve abstracted this to Math.random() * this.randomRange – this.randomRange/2.

Example

Here I’ve got dots created and placed randomly, with randomly set scale and alpha. On every frame each dot has a random velocity applied to it’s x and y coordinates.
The yellow dot is the simple example (code below) and the rest are included in the complex example below.

Actionscript

Simple Example:

Complex example:

Download

randomMotion.fla

Overview

In flash you can have text areas that are rendered as html. You can also apply formatting styles to this html. This will show a simple example on how to apply css to html text in flash. I’ll do a simple anchor tag style to show you the ropes. We’ll style a link to be underlined and then when you hover or mouse over it, we’ll change the color. It’s a design style that is widely used online in html, but flash doesn’t natively do it. As a matter of fact, flash doesn’t even natively underline links.

Steps

1. Import TextField.StyleSheet
2. create a style sheet object: var myCSS:StyleSheet = new StyleSheet();
3. Specify your styles: myCSS.setStyle(“a:link”, {color:’#0000CC’,textDecoration:’underline’});
4. Ensure that the text box is html enabled: myHTML.htmlText = myHTMLText;
5. Apply the style sheet object to your html text box: myHTML.styleSheet = myCSS;

Example

Actionscript

Download

open source flashhtmlcss.zip