Free! - Configure your Flash application using XML

Configure your Flash application using XML

If you’re anything like me, you don’t particularly enjoy having to launch Flash for a quick little fix, export again and deploy it on a website.

Well using the power of XML you can make your life a lot easier. What I’ll be discussing in this article is the concept of a configuration XML file and how to use it most efficiently for your Flash projects.

Getting started

What exactly is a configuration XML file I hear you saying? It’s not difficult at all; in simple terms what it does is define some properties and corresponding values that overwrite the default values in your Flash application.

Let’s look at an example of such an XML file:

The XML file above shows a typical configuration XML file that allows you to change the companyName and companyLink variables without having to recompile the Flash application.

This XML document is saved as config.xml and placed in the root folder of your Flash application. Of course that’s not enough to get it to work; we need a little bit of code in the Flash application to load in the XML and get hold of the configuration parameters which we’ll look at next.

Creating a Flash Portfolio movie – part 1

A few weeks ago, a reader asked how to create a portfolio movie in Flash. Because this is a common request, and the reader had a specific layout in mind, the team at DMXZone thought it might make a good subject for a tutorial. We’ll build a portfolio web site that has the layout shown below.

An Online Presentation Application With Flash Communication Server MX – part 2

Introduction:

This is 2^nd part of this series of articles targeting the steps required to create an online presentation application with Adobe’s (formerly Macromedia Inc.) Flash Communication server 1.5. In the last episode, we learnt how to make a simple presentation application that enabled the presenter to show Jpeg slides to, deliver speech/information about the slides and the users could interact through a text chat.

The general rule in such applications is the greater the number of users, the greater the load on the server and if the application are flooded by un-invited users, then the application may suffer performance issues. In order to avoid this problem, we will learn how to avoid non-invited users by giving access to a select group of users.

Working with blends

In the previous article, I showed you how to work with the new Filters feature in Flash Professional 8. They allow you to create some amazing effects on your movie clips, buttons and text fields. In this article, I’ll cover the Blend Modes that you can find in Flash Professional 8. As with the filters, you may have seen blends in software packages like Fireworks and Photoshop. Flash doesn’t offer the same range that you’d find in PhotoShop, but you’ll be surprised at the great effects that you can achieve with the blend modes that are available.

Blends allow you to combine the colours in overlapping objects to achieve different visual effects. Flash Professional 8 includes the following blend modes: Normal, Layer, Darken, Multiply, Lighten, Screen, Overlay, Hard light, Add, Subtract, Difference, Invert, Alpha and Erase. I’ll look at each of these blend modes and show you some examples at the end of the article.

You’ll need a copy of Flash Professional 8 to see the filters covered in this article. You can download a trial copy from the Macromedia Web site.

Download the source files for the tutorial from the blue Properties box that contains the article PDF. There's a heading titled Code Download and you can click the Details link next to it to get the zip file. The download includes the starter files you'll need as well as the completed files.

Let’s get started with an introduction to each of the blend modes.

Printing in Flash

Printing in Flash

In earlier versions of Flash, printing out your movies was really hard work. Flash MX 2004 introduced the PrintJob class which gave us much more control over printing. It also made the process a whole lot easier.

You can use the PrintJob class to print the Stage from your Flash movie or you can set up movies made especially for printing. These special print movies don’t need to be visible within your main Flash document and they can even be located on a different frame. It’s also possible to create the print movie clip and load the content entirely in ActionScript, before you print it out.

In this tutorial, I want to show you how to get started with the PrintJob class. We’ll look at how you can use it to print the Stage from your Flash movie and then we’ll print out a movie clip that isn’t visible in the published SWF file.

Because the PrintJob class was introduced in Flash Player 7, you’ll need to have at least Flash MX 2004 to complete this tutorial and you’ll have to target Flash Player 7 and above when publishing. You can download the resource files for this tutorial from the blue Properties box that contains the article PDF. There's a heading titled Code Download and you can click the Details link next to it to get the zip file.  The zip file includes the starter Flash file, a text file that we’ll load and my completed file.