Last week, I decided to update our website design, due to a complaint from someone who couldn’t view it in Internet Explorer. If you’re into web design, chances are Internet Explorer has caused more than a few headaches. At least it has for me. Aside from making our new site less busy and cranking up the sexiness to 11, my main goal was creating a site that actually worked in Internet Explorer, even though I hate IE with all my soul.
So, as expected, I ran into an annoying problem. When I tried to style the rollover buttons on our new site (see the navigation links at the top right of the redesigned site for an example) to have no background color until rolled over, they worked great in Safari and Firefox on Mac and PC, but didn’t work at all in IE. Nice! After trying many different solutions, and getting to a point of insanity searching for an answer, I finally found it on the Microsoft Developer Network site.
Here’s what I learned- in Internet Explorer, in order to have a CSS background change when you roll over a link (using the a:hover pseudo selector), you also need to set the background property of the link when you’re not rolling over. So, the a tag needs to have a background color or background image, if you want to have a background color or image for a:hover. That’s it! What I ended up doing is creating a 1 x 1 pixel transparent .png file, and one that was a white pixel. While that may not be the best solution, since you have to wait for the white pixel image to load the first time you roll over, it works for now, and I’m happy.
At the time of the writing of my book on developing Flash Games for the Wii, the only way to connect Flash and the Wii console (not just the controller) was to develop Flash Player 7 games and browse to them via the Wii’s Internet Channel. While these games could be fun and addictive, like Missile Command 3D, Flash support on the Internet Channel is limited (i.e. Flash Player 7, ActionScript 2.0, and weak Flash Player performance).
Recently, Nintendo has made it possible to develop actual Wii console games using all Flash. While an official announcement hasn’t come yet, this could mean a lot to developers who make excellent Flash web games and want to create games for a home console. Of course, Wii game development will likely only be an option for those developers approved by Nintendo. Even so, this gives us Flash developers the potential to create games on a whole new platform that’s highly popular and has a unique control scheme.
As a game loving guy, I admit I’ve had my fair share of fantasies about developing a console game. It’s amazing to see that it’s now possible using Flash.
Thursday comes again, and awesomely it comes with another deal! Today, it’s Todd Perkins’ ActionScript 3.0: Working with XML. The going rate for this title on a disc is $49.95, but we’re letting it go for…wait for it…$34.99! Unbelievable!
So, what will you learn from this disc? Basically, Todd Perkins teaches how to master using XML with ActionScript 3.0. You’ll learn how to work with RSS feeds to read data from external and remote URLs, as well as how to write XML data using E4X syntax and save it to a file. Also, you’ll learn how to work with different types of RSS data, such as that used by blogs and podcasts, as well as the RSS feed used by Flickr to bring Flickr images into Flash!
Sold? You can pick it up from the All Things Adobe Storefront hosted by Amazon. You can also watch some movies for free before you commit to buying. Continue reading past the break for a more detailed description of the training.
Yesterday, Lee Brimelow posted an interesting article about Flash Player 10 security. The issue lies with the FileReference class, which can no longer be used to open a browse-for-file window without user interaction:
In previous versions of the Flash Player, you could programmatically call theFileReference.browse() method to open a file browser dialog window which enabled users to locate a file on their system so that it could be uploaded to a server. Many existing applications use this feature including various WordPress and Flickr uploaders. In Flash Player 10 you can no longer spawn this dialog window programmatically and it must be initiated by a user click. The attempt to launch the dialog with code will throw a security exception, effectively breaking these existing applications.
The TweenLite engine is an amazing ActionScript tweening engine that allows you to quickly create animations using one line of code. This episode shows where to get TweenLite, and how to use it to create ActionScript animations.
I spoke at Flashbelt earlier today, and it was awesome! Thanks to all who came to my session on creating Flash Wii games! Anyway, I’ve uploaded the files I demoed so you can check them out. If you make any cool games, let me know!
A lot of folks ask me how to create a simple preloader using ActionScript 3.0 in Flash CS3, so I thought I’d share the information with everyone all at once. Head past the break for the idea behind creating the simple preloader shown here. Read the rest of this entry »
Recently, I’ve been asked a lot about creating applications by writing code in an FLA file vs. creating them using classes and Object Oriented Programming. Making the decision can sometimes be tough, especially to those who are new to programming. Usually, it’s hard for people new to programming to justify doing the work to create classes. Honestly, I use a lot of classes and FLA code. So, why choose either one when building an application? Read the rest of this entry »
So here’s my first crack at an AIR app. It’s a simple analog clock that you can drag around and stuff. The coolest thing about it is that is was so easy to make! I spent most of the time designing the art of the clock! Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think.
Also, in order to get it to work, you need to have AIR 1.0 installed.
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