Adventures in Electrostatic

Its been nice to have the excuse to learn some more Flash stuff I have neglected over the years. Last week it was database stuff, and this week it was learning to be a better Flash programmer. Not necessarily that much more skilled, but more responsible. Flash is usually a mess after you are done coding it. Script all over the place, almost impossible to debug if you come back to it in a year, or heaven forbid you give it to someone else. Now that I’m starting to do some Flash work professionally, I figured it would be a good thing to get some good habits under my belt.

So, I decided to learn a couple things that would enable me to concentrate my coding to just one place: the timeline… in the actions layer. The main obstacle in that pursuit is button and mouse events. I usually just put them on the movieClips themselves, but that is a bad practice; I needed to learn more about event handlers and such… so I did. And the ‘better’ way is actually better. Yay!

In the process of looking at event handlers, I came across something unexpected and very interesting: An .as script that allows users to use key combinations in Flash. This guy wrote a class that allows you to define key combinations and functions that execute when they are pressed… and the best thing is its easy to implement. The easy part was especially important for me because I had never used external code in Flash, so it was my first… and good news, it was easy and I am no longer afraid of it.

Thats about it really, kinda boring from the outside… but it was really good for me. Oh, and the best thing about the .swf I made was that the only thing in it is two empty frames with actions in them. I know, profesh.

Here is the app I made.

…and the source files is anyone is interested.