While I was away on vacation VisitKC launched successfully.

I worked on the homepage Flash and a simple slide show that integrates with our REIgnition CMS on the Locals and Meeting Planners homepages.

Since its on the homepage, I had to take special care in loading the Flash and all of its assets. Each “scene” is loaded individually, but in the end the parallax layers work as they would if everything were static. It was a lot of work, but doesn’t compare to the amount of work the rest of the team put into the site.

I came across this error and am blogging about it so I won’t forget the solution and maybe it will help someone else.

1172: Definition fl.video:VideoEvent could not be found.

In order to access a number of the “fl” packages you need to have a component in your library. In this case I added the FLVPlayback component and all was well. Apparently you can use flash.utils.getDefinitionByName as well.

I only worked on the homepage Flash piece and a small interactive map but I really like the way it all turned out. Props to everyone at BarkleyREI who worked on it.

VisitAnnapolis.org

So far my favorite events are Event.ADDEDTOSTAGE and Event.REMOVEDFROMSTAGE, they just makes things that much easier.

For instance, I have a SimpleToolTip class that all you have to do is addChild and removeChild to manage it. When its added to the stage, I initialize everything that I need to turn on, when I remove it I turn everything back off.

Its just nice and clean.

Something that I worked on and finished up before leaving sunKING is AE’s 77e New Music Weekly. It showcases a lot of really great bands and provides a few free mp3s each week.

If you build just about any Flash application you will need a menu that will manage button states and let you know when something has been clicked. This class will do that and can be implemented in projects big and small. Below is a very basic example on how it can be used, on the Mall World page it is implemented six times. Can you guess where?

A very basic implementation

Creating a Menu Object can be as simple as this


var menu = new Menu();
menu.addItem({clip: buttonOne, id: 1});
menu.addItem({clip: buttonTwo, id: 2});
menu.addEventListener(MenuEvent.NAVIGATE, this.menuNavigateHandler);


This code is released under the MIT License with just one request. If you improve it in some way that could benefit other users leave a comment.

Download the code & example files

Here are a few of the usefull undocumented paramaters you can set on the Macromedia V2 components. This will set a theme for your components globally.

_global.style.setStyle("themeColor", 0x171717);
_global.style.setStyle("fontFamily", "Georgia");
_global.style.setStyle("fontSize", 10);
_global.style.setStyle("backgroundColor", 0xFFFFFF);
_global.style.setStyle("textRollOverColor", 0xFFFFFF);
_global.style.setStyle("textSelectedColor", 0x7DA4CC);