flash

I have received some emails from people wondering how to go about implementing variations on the Flash XML Slideshow from this blog post. I've created two variations based on the most popular requests.

Variation One
Using back/next buttons. This example has simple previous and next buttons to cycle through the slideshow sequentially.
Download the .fla

I recently found out that when using the 3D rotation and transformation tools in Flash CS4, the movieclip or object that has the transformation applied to becomes slightly blurred. I have found that if you apply a 200% scale transformation to the movieclip you want to have the rotation effect applied to, and then nest it in another movieclip that has 50% scale transformation, it results in the end product being much crisper.

I recently found out while building my custom flash video player that if an FLV is encoded without an audio channel it plays back faster than normal the first time the video loads. It seems to be a bug inherent to flash, as I have come across this happening on popular sites such as vimeo and youtube. A workaround to this issue is to render silence for the duration of your video, and encode that audio file into your FLV.

Note - I also posted a blog entry on making a slideshow with back/next buttons and individual buttons that can be found here.

Updates include:

• a preloader movieclip,
• ignore the image file if the path is not defined correctly or the image cannot be found,
• once the image is loaded, the image is cast as bitmap data object, and bitmap data smoothing is applied,
• and now the images will be chosen in a random order, and will only repeat once all images have been seen.

Once again source code (heavily commented) and example is posted below. Let me know if you have any updates, feature requests, or you want me to post the .fla file.

Note - Please see updated slideshow here

I had some time to sit down and work on some projects in Actionscript 3, and came up with this XML Slideshow viewer.

Right now the functionality is fairly basic, it reads in the image URL from the XML and displays the image with a nice easing effect. I used the TweenLite tweening library to fade in and tween the images.

The source code is posted below, and check back soon for a version with preloaders showing, different transition effects and random image order instead of sequential. Let me know if you have any suggestions, questions or comments.