Building a bar chart in Flash, part 1

I get a lot of queries from people about how to create charts in Flash. Flash MX shipped with some chart components and there are a number of commercial products available that can help you make charts. However, if you need to make a simple chart, you can quite easily write your own. That’s the topic for this tutorial.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create your own reusable BarChart class. We’ll draw the axes and bars with the drawing API. We’ll allow users of the class to create it with default values and labels or set their own. We’ll also allow people to add their own title and bar colour. If you’re not familiar with the drawing API, I won’t cover it in detail here so if you need a refresher, check out the Drawing with Flash article.

Scripting blend modes

Flash Professional 8 includes a range of blend modes similar to those in Fireworks or Photoshop. Blends allow you to change the colour of overlapping objects to achieve different visual effects. The resulting colour depends on the colours of the objects and the blend mode you choose.

Flash Professional 8 includes the following blend modes: Normal, Layer, Darken, Multiply, Lighten, Screen, Overlay, Hard light, Add, Subtract, Difference, Invert, Alpha and Erase. In this article, you’ll find out more about these blend modes and learn how to work with them in ActionScript.

You’ll need a copy of Flash Professional 8 to see the features covered in this article. You can download a trial copy from the Macromedia Web site. You should also install Flash Player 8. Because the article includes changes to ActionScript, you can’t publish the code to Flash Player 7 and earlier. Note that the code samples within the article all use AS2.0.

You can download the files referred to in 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.

This article is part of the new interactive e-book; Out of my mind: Flash 8 Power

Let’s get started by looking at what each blend mode does.

Scripting filters, part 2

In part one of the Scripting filters in Flash Professional 8 series, I showed you how to use ActionScript to work with filters. We covered how to add, modify and delete filters. I also covered the Bevel and Blur filters in detail and gave you an example of how to use each one.

In this article, I want to cover the remaining filters included in Flash Professional 8.  We’ll look at the following filters.

• ColorMatrix
• Convolution
• DisplacementMap
• DropShadow
• Glow
• Gradient Glow
• Gradient Bevel

We’ll see examples of how to work with these filters. We’ll work through a couple of examples so you can see some uses. You’ll need a copy of Flash Professional 8 and Flash Player 8 to work through this article. You can download a trial copy from the Macromedia Web site. Note that the code samples within the article all use AS2.0.

You can download the files referred to in 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.

We’ll start by looking at the ActionScript only filters - the ColorMatrix, Convolution and DisplacementMap filters. These are advanced filters that contain complicated calculations.

This article is part of the new interactive e-book; Out of my mind: Flash 8 Power

Scripting Filters, part 1

If you’ve been reading the articles about the new features in Flash 8, you’ll know that Flash Professional 8 includes a range of filters that allow you to add special effects to objects on the Stage. In an earlier article, I showed you how to apply the following filters using the Flash interface:

• Bevel
• Blur
• DropShadow
• Glow
• Gradient Glow
• Gradient Bevel

You can also use ActionScript to work with these filters. In addition, you get to work with the extra filters listed below when you use ActionScript:

• Convolution
• ColorMatrix
• DisplacementMap

This article is part of the new interactive e-book; Out of my mind: Flash 8 Power

These are more advanced filters than the first group and involve complicated calculations. I’ll give you information about them but you might want to start scripting with the other filters in ActionScript first.

In this article, I’ll start by covering some background about how to work with filters in ActionScript. We’ll look at the Bevel and Blur filters and create a motion effect. In the next article, I’ll look at the other filters and we’ll create a small application that allows you to adjust a Drop Shadow filter dynamically.

You’ll need a copy of Flash Professional 8 to see the features covered in this article. You can download a trial copy from the Macromedia Web site. You should also install Flash Player 8. Note that the code samples within the article all use AS2.0.

You can download the files referred to in 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.

Producing Excel reports from Flash

Every new version of Flash comes with a train and a little wagon of nice new features.
Despite all the improvements there are still a few things in Flash technology that aren’t just there, and generating professionally looking printable reports is one of them.  Printing dynamic (data-driven) content from Flash has always been a difficult task. No doubt that the PrintJob class that’s been added to the application API in version 7 has been a huge improvement, yet it hasn’t solved all the problems.
While Flash is very good for printing high resolution graphics (because of its native support for vector graphic format) some tasks that are considered basic in browser environment are very difficult to achieve.

Working with Text in Flash 8 ActionScript

In this article, I’m going to look at some of the new text features that are available using ActionScript in Flash 8. If you have read some of the earlier articles, you’ll have seen that Flash 8 includes some improved text options.

This article is part of the new interactive e-book; Out of my mind: Flash 8 Power

Flash 8 uses FlashType - a new text rendering engine. It provides high-quality text rendering, especially at small font sizes so that the appearance of text is improved in Flash Player 8. FlashType can’t be used with earlier Flash Players but it is automatically selected when you publish to the Flash 8 player.  Flash 8 also includes other options for working with text including new ActionScript properties for the TextFormat class and new anti-aliasing settings.