Archives

Archive for May, 2005

Notes on skinning the Bit component set, update to the component properties extension

The bit component set is, as claimed, infinitely easier to skin than MM’s components. Just drop the skin folder into your library and skin away. There a few caveats though:

TextInput component: The skin is misnamed in the library for some reason. Duplicate the textInputSkin movie clip and export the duplicate for actionscript with the name […]

Wireframe.co.za is back from the grave

( News )

Wireframe.co.za was one of the most impressive sites of its time (early Flash 5), featuring several experiments in 3d and a famous pixel art look that inspired me, several years later, to create the pixel tools. I was looking for some inspiration for my next pixel tool (probably an iso cube) and noticed that they’ve […]

Making the Bit component set ComboBox work with Flash Player 6

While the vast majority of the components in the bit component set are compatible with Flash player 7, the combobox isn’t, and my client wanted player 6 compatibility (yes, despite the new stats that are out). Now I thought the problem might be due to the use of getNextHighestDepth, but in fact Keith thought of […]

Obscure but very useful MovieClip.hitArea property

MovieClip.hitArea is a little known but very useful property. Basically it allows you to set a movieclip’s hit area for mouse events (onPress, onRollOver, etc.) to another movieclip. It’s basically the scripting equivalent of the fourth frame for buttons.

There are a lot of situations here this might be useful. Recently I’ve add to create a […]

mx.utils.Delegate: more useful every day

The alternative form of setInterval for classes is:

setInterval(instance, ‘functionName’, time);  

It seems to work intermittently in some circumstances, if you have a complicated class layout. In addition, the second parameter does not get checked by the compiler, so if you misspell it it can take a while to spot. You can get rid of those issues […]