In a previous post, I introduced the release of FlashEff 2 as an innovative Flash animation tool. In an attempt to prove my point, I am going to demonstrate how you can use FlashEff2 to create a button using a MovieClip object. While FlashEff can handle so much more, see how streamlined this process becomes with the use of FlashEff.

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Struggling to get our foot off the ground with getting more intimate with ActionScript 3.0?  Doug Winnie has kicked off a series, ActionScript 1:1, which are designed for animators and designers using Flash CS4 who want to take their work to the next level but need some guidance adding custom interactivity using ActionScript 3.0.

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Over the years, the Flash Player has received such a bad rep for hogging computer system resources even while displaying static content. There were many times in which I would wonder "What the heck is Flash processing?". As for Flash Developers/Designers, there was only so much we can do to optimize the SWF via runtime. That was then, this is now!

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Dynamic mask objects have been key to many Flash project's success. When it comes to migrating over from AS2 to AS3, you'll find that things have changed as the method "setMask()" in AS2 is now a property called "mask".  In this next edition of the Moving From AS2 to AS3 series, I will be comparing the two solutions and offering an efficient solution to creating dynamic masks using AS3.

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Managing depths in AS2 was pretty annoying and time consuming. You'd spend so much time dedicating depth ranges for MovieClip groups, but in the end the limitations of AS2 really got the last laugh. Who's laughing now?

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In a previous tutorial, I demonstrated a simple solution to loading an external sound file. In that example, the mp3 file that had been loaded begins to play automatically. While this might be fine in some cases, you probably would want more control over the sound being imported. For example, being able to stop or pause then play again might be a good place to start.   In this tutorial, I will be demonstrating how to play, stop, and pause sounds using AS3 once you have the sound loaded into Flash.

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Filtering data XML data using AS2 has to be one of the most sought out features when dealing XML-driven Flash projects. Being able to automatically grab certain relevant information without manually searching each and every XML node and/or attribute. What if we were given the ability to create filters that will automatically pull the information needed from XML nodes and/or attributes. But wait we can't do that, right? Right, that is until the birth of ActionScript 3.0.

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Sound has become a key addition to many Flash projects: offline and online. In many cases, integrating sound can actually amplify the final results of a project. However, in many other cases sound should not even be a topic for discussion. Whatever your case may be, I am going to quickly go over how to load an external sound file using AS3.

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Thanks to the Adobe Gods for making the lives of so many Flash developers much less complicated when dealing with XML Data. XML and AS2 just did not get along very well. In AS3, the XML libraries have been completely overhauled. These new changes provide a much more seamless XML integration that is based on the web standards of E4X.

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While most smaller Flash projects do not really need a preloader due to the today's Internet speed, it is still good practice to always include a preloader in all your Flash projects. In this brief tutorial, I will demonstrate how to preload your Flash assets using AS3.

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