Articles Tagged "Tutorial"

“Walkthroughs” added to PageFlip Tutorials

I’ve added a bunch of video walk-throughs to some of the more challenging PageFlip tutorials on this site.

Please let me know if you find them useful or if there’s anything I could do to improve them.

FullScreen OnMouseMove Bug

stinkbugHere’s an interesting fact: Going to FullScreen mode causes Flash to temporarily stop executing all onMouseMove events.

I’m sure if someone from Adobe was pressed hard enough they might be able to provide some convoluted ~logical~ reasons why going into full-screen mode stops all onMouseMove events but I’m not buying it. I wasted a few frustrating hours figuring this out and when I searched the web to confirm my suspicions I found no mention of this “feature” so I’m calling it what it is, a BUG.

Here, take a look at this ugly SWF (move your mouse around to draw a line whenever the OnMouseMove event is fired and then press the blue square to toggle fullScreen mode)
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Drawing a Closed Arc Shape

This tutorial provides the ActionScript needed to draw a “Closed Arc” which is my way of describing the solid shape created by connecting a pair of concentric arcs with 2 straight lines. Here’s an illustration to explain:

(If you’re new to drawing arcs I suggest reading my previous circle and arc tutorials for an introduction to trigonometry in Flash.)

In my standard arc drawing tutorial I explained the following ActionScript code
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PageFlip Version Detection Fix

Unfortunately the release of Adobe Flash Player 10 has revealed a weakness in my version detection code. As a result, the pageflip SWF will fail to load and viewers will be prompted to download the Flash 6 Player. Fortunately there are 2 quick fixes
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Flash Scripted Conic Angle Gradient

One of the quirkier aspects of Flash is its lack of a 'conic' gradient fill. The conic gradient has been a mainstay of drawing apps like CorelDraw and Photoshop (where it's called an "Angle Gradient") for ages but Flash still hasn't implemented this basic feature. Go ahead and check... it's not there.

NOTE: This tutorial uses some of the code and concepts from my previous Color Gradient and Circle Drawing tutorials so I highly recommend checking them out for a more in-depth explanation of the following code ...
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Animated Arc Drawing

A recent comment on my Oval Drawing Tutorial asks how to “give the appearance that an oval is being drawn slowly”. Hmmm… this sounds like a job for my handy Arc Drawing Function.

Slowly drawing (or revealing) a circle can be achieved by drawing arcs of an ever-increasing size until the arc is so big that it comes back to the beginning and makes a full circle. The same is true with ovals. First let’s take a look at the basic code for drawing an arc of a circle
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Elegant Ellipses

While researching how to draw rotated ovals I learned some interesting facts about ellipses and thought I’d share them with you:

  • Ellipse Definition: There are many ways to say it, but essentially an ellipse is just a circle stretched along one axis. Think, “smushed penny on a train track” or if you want to get technical about it you could say, “an ellipse is formed by a locus of points in a plane such that the sum of the distances to two fixed points is a constant.” Which means…
  • One way to draw an ellipse is to:
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