http://www.t-roy.net blog by designer troy ginbey Sun, 28 Sep 2008 14:44:25 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en With CSS, it's possible to make the first element after another element look different to the rest. Lets say you have a title, and two paragraphs afterwards e.g.: <h3>My Paragraph Title</h3> <p>This is paragraph one.</p> <p>This is paragraph two.</p> To make the first paragraph after the title bold, you use what's called an 'adjacent ... http://www.t-roy.net/2008/09/28/making-the-first-paragraph-bold-with-css/ I've decided to add a new category to my blog - CSS. It's been a topic I've wanted to write about for a while now, only if to learn a thing or two along the way. I'm going to cover all things to do with CSS - from Learning CSS, ... http://www.t-roy.net/2008/09/28/new-css-category/ Yep... They make you smarter, more interesting, and give you those good looking friends you see on commercials. I literally haven't put it down since I walked out of the shop with it yesterday... Sorry Sarah! :) http://www.t-roy.net/2008/08/30/iphones-make-you-a-better-person/ This is pretty cool... being able to control your Flash movies from your HTML page through JavaScript. To do this, you need to make use of Flash's ExternalInterface (from Flash 8+) Your flash code will look something like this: import flash.external.ExternalInterface; function stopVideoPlaying() { myVideo.stop(); } ExternalInterface.addCallback("stopVideoPlaying", this, stopVideoPlaying); The first line imports the External Interface. ... http://www.t-roy.net/2008/07/16/calling-an-actionscript-function-from-flash/ Wow... every so often you stumble upon something that you know will change the way you design forever. I was flicking through the ACP (Adobe Certified Professional) Exam Guide for Flash CS3 (as you do on a Sunday), and came across something I didn't recognise - scale9Grid. scale9Grid divides a display ... http://www.t-roy.net/2008/05/25/scale9grid-in-as30/ I've been using Array for a while now - but don't frequently use all of it's methods... so I'm going to go through the ones I don't use a lot.... Array.sort(); var beers:Array = ["Fosters", "Alpha", "VB", "Asahi"]; beers.sort(); // default sort trace(beers); // output: Angelou,Blake,Dante,cummings beers.sort(Array.CASEINSENSITIVE); trace(beers); // output: Alpha,asahi,Fosters,VB beers.sort(Array.DESCENDING); trace(beers); // output: asahi,VB,Fosters,Alpha beers.sort(Array.DESCENDING | ... http://www.t-roy.net/2008/05/22/array-methods-in-as30/ package { import flash.display.*; import flash.text.TextField; public class AS3Tester extends Sprite { public function AS3Tester() { var myTextContainer:TextField = new TextField(); myTextContainer.text = "I like beer"; this.addChild(myTextContainer); } } } In the above code, I create a variable to reference a new TextField object, and set it's text to "I like beer". This alone wont add the TextField to the stage. ... http://www.t-roy.net/2008/05/21/adding-display-objects-to-the-display-list-in-as30/ Display List programming is a big part of ActionScript 3.0... Basically anything that is visually added to the stage must be added to Flash's Display List hierarchy. In the next few posts I'm going to go through a few core display programming tasks... Adding display objects to the display list Removing objects ... http://www.t-roy.net/2008/05/20/display-list-programming-in-as30/ Garbage collection is a BIG deal in AS3 - Adobe have a couple of good articles articles which explains the theory... http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/garbage_collection.html http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/resource_management.html http://www.t-roy.net/2008/05/19/taking-out-the-trash-in-as30/ An XMLList is a great object for working with one or more XML elements. You can call methods on the elements as a group or on the individual elements in the collection. In the example below, I've created an XML List to store all beers from the beers XML object ... http://www.t-roy.net/2008/05/18/uses-for-xmllist/