I attend a young adult church group that meets every Thursday night at 7:00pm. I wanted to create a countdown timer in Flash that could automatically tell you how far away the next gathering is. It was a fun challenge, and I wanted to write about what I did to make it happen. (This article is explained from a theory standpoint, with code samples to illustrate the process. You will not find a step by step tutorial with code you can cut and paste, but I have included the entire working code for you to use [at the bottom].) From the treetop view, all we need to do is create a Date object for today,...

When working with Actionscript 3, you may find a need to load a set of images into your swf file, one after the other. Using this tutorial, you can easily specify your images in XML, and load them intro your swf, while tracking the progress of each load.

Technology can be extremely frustrating. I was getting a feel for the new Snap feature in Windows 7 that allows you to “conveniently arrange windows” and the result was the Thwirl application I use for Twitter was forced full screen and I could not unlock it, move it or resize it. I started digging around the local AppData files and finally found the solution in the Program Files. C:\Program Files\twhirl\META-INF\AIR Open the file application.xml and change the resizable node value to ‘true’. Restart the app and you can now re-size that sucker.

I love to write tutorials, but sometimes it’s easier to send you to someone who’s already done an awesome job writing one. http://www.photoshopsupport.com/tutorials/jennifer/favicon.html Thanks Jennifer!

I was having a little trouble getting Javascript to communicate with my flash movie using the ExternalInterface class in AS3. The issue ended up being that I made a silly mistake of not re-publishing my flash when I updated it. In my quest to solve the problem I ran across this really well done tutorial the covers the process from start to finish. The design is great and Bri Lance really put some extra time into it. Check it out! Connecting Flash and Javascript using ExternalInterface View more presentations from Bri Lance.

I received an email today that included this following very informative disclaimer. DISCLAIMER: This is not an unsolicited mail. Under Bill 1618 Title III passed by the 105th US Congress this mail cannot be considered Spam as long as we include contact information and a method to be removed from our mailing list. If you have received this message in error or are not interested in receiving our e-mails, please reply with a “REMOVE” in the subject line and we will remove your e-mail address from our future mailings.

The beauty and hell of cascading style sheets is that you can apply styles to many different elements on your webpage at the same time. Sometimes changing a style property fixes your problem but then causes ten more. This problem seemed to surface more once I started using PHP, ASP.NET, includes and templates. Of course, being a master CSS-smith is one way to not to make problems for yourself, but until you get there, try this: Set up a small script that will pull the current pages URL and dynamically add the pages name as a class to your top-level div container. Page name = home.aspx <div...

The problem: When you create a page in Wordpress, you’re actually creating a database entry that stores the title and the content. When you load that information it gets wrapped in a template. Every page is wrapped in the same template. This template is in your selected theme’s folder and is called ‘page.php’. What if you need to have different PHP template files for different pages? How do you set this up? The solution: Edit ‘page.php’ to check what page your on, and then load the appropriate template. The implementation: If you edit page.php you’ll notice...

I ran into an issue today when I tried to call the indexOf function on an array in AS2. This is an Actionscript 3 function that wasn’t implemented in Actionscript 2. You can implement this functionality by protyping the Array class with this function: Code: Array.prototype.getPos = function(item){ for(i=0; i<this.length; ++i) { if (this[i] == item) { return i; } } return null; }; Once this is in place, you can implement like so: Code: var ary = [obj1, obj2, obj3]; ary.getPos(obj2); This return a value of 1. credit: Roland Levy

I have a few projects that are in the works and would be far more productive if I were able to team up with a good php developer. These projects are things I’ve been doing in my free time, and they’re impressive. I have two front-end applications developed in Flash, one interfaces with the Google Maps API, the other pulls profile information from a popular website and displays it in a small widget.