During the creation of the latest changes in my portfolio site, I needed to duplicate a loaded image that has to be placed as a material in papervison3d's cube. We don't have duplicateMovieClip in AS3, so we have to use another technique.

Google offers a lot of free tools for us. One of them is really useful and easy to work with - GoogleMaps API. In this article I will show you how to import a map in Flash and place an icon in a specific place.

There are some features in Flash that we can't work without. Tween classes are among the most used ones. They give you ability to animate objects without using the timeline, to change the animation fast and easy. The idea of these classes is very simple. That's why I think that it is a good idea to have your own tween manager that you can modify to fit into your needs.

I just can't code without delegation. I'm using it every day and wanted to share this method with you.

Papervision3d is probably the most popular 3D flash engine. There are dozen of applications/sites that use it. These days I also decided to create a 3D effect in my portfolio site. Everything works fine, but I needed a tooltip for each of the 3D objects on my scene. To be able to animate everything I needed 2D coordinates of all my 3D elements.

I'm absolutely sure that all of you are working with JSON objects. It's pretty helpful to be able to print them and find out what exactly they contain. I wrote a simple function that makes this possible.

There are some things that I'm doing in almost every project. Loading of data in Flash is actually one of them. In this article I'll show you how to load information from MySQL database. We will use PHP as a junction between the Flash and the database. You need an Apache server like XAMPP or EasyPHP installed or just a hosting account that supports php.

A couple of months ago I integrated a nice WYSIWYG editor written in Flex in my CMS. It worked fine, till yesterday I needed to add more features like text formatting and font color changing. As you know the Flex RichTextEditor component adds some additional tags that I definitely don't want to send to the database. So I wrote a simple function to remove these tags.

A very simple way to validate date in JavaScript:

Did you ever wonder how to exclude a directory from a .htaccess file. Here is the solution, it works perfect for me:

In my work as a flash developer very often I receive from the client just one photoshop file with the design of the application/site that has to be coded. In the last project the designer made the ComboBox in the style of the site. So I couldn't use the default look of the Flash's drop down component.

FlashDevelop is a wonderful codding editor. It has a lot of features like highlighting, code snippets, auto completion, syntax coloring. It's pretty easy to create a Flex application with it. You have to only follow these nine simple steps:
1. Download FlashDevelop from here
2. Install FlashDevelop
3. Download FlexSDK from here
4. Unzip the FlexSDK's archive
5. Open FlashDevelop -> Tools -> Program Settings
6. Find AS3Context plugin in the left column
7. Change "Flex SDK Location" property
8. Choose Project -> New Project -> Select "Flex 3 Project" -> Set name and location of the project
9. Press F5 for compilation

Check out here.

http://seantheflexguy.com/blog...interface-actionscript-3-0-api/

TweenManager is ActionScript3 class that helps you to animate your objects in flash. You don't need to create timeline type animations, because you can control every property of the object. Also it helps you to create a sequence by different animations/events. In the examples below I'll show you how to use the manager to solve different problems during your daily flash work.

Really interesting article by Jean-Philippe Auclair. Check out here.

My latest flash game. It's a fantasy RPG jump'n'run game. Check out here.

The solution was so easy: stage.stageFocusRect = false;
Thanks to Rockabit for the post here.

Very helpful solution that will save you maybe several hours. I used JSFL language and very short script to parse all the items in the library. Then for every item just embed the characters that I wanted. Get the script from here http://www.outset.ws/files/jsfl/embedCharactersInTextField.jsfl. In flash: Commangs -> Run command (or simply Ctrl+R) and point the script file.
You can download the jsfl documentation from here http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/main/flash_cs3_extending.pdf.

A new project in my portfolio. Check out here.

Thanks to Mike Scutari for the great review of SVET. Check out here.

Finally I finished some bugs of my own project management system and I think it's ready for use. SVET is one of my biggest projects and it's a web based project management system, that helps you to organize your work. Basically it's an online notebook which you can use to store the information for your projects. It enables you to track your working time and communicate with your team and clients. You can also make detailed reports of what you've done for a specific period of time. Please check out here.

Днес в продължение на два часа се опитвах (неуспешно) да реша проблем с tab ordering в една форма за регистрация. Формата е във външен swf файл, който embed-вам във flex приложение. Set-нах tabIndex, tabChildren и tabEnabled както и където трябва но нещата не се получаваха. Решението се оказа focusManager.deactivate() на контейнера, който attach-ва swf файла. Благодарности на Jeff dePascale за споделения опит.

Пиша си аз едно програмче и ползвам DataGrid компонент. Правя си custom itemRenderer-и, слагам им малко цвят и допълнителна функционалност и всичко е ок, докато не тествам с повечко данни. При вертикално скролване някак си редовете се разместват и допълнително стиловете, които съм добавил. Решението се оказа доста просто и лесно. Във всеки от itemRenderer-ите сложете invalidateProperties(); в FlexEvent.DATA_CHANGE listener функцията. Пример за това, как DataGrid-а не работи правилно без този метод и съответно как нещата си идват на място с него може да се види тук.

AS3 Performance Tester

These days I finished one of the games for CasinoGamesPro. The game is video poker. Check out here. To see more of my works please visit my portfolio.

I'm working with a class for creating scrolling text field. So I'm using a MovieClip as mask and TextField. When I test the movie and close the testing window Flash just crashes. It's because I have applied the mask directly to the TextField :) The problem is described here. Thank you BKWLD !

The new flash player 10.