Flash Tutorial: Dynamically Load External Images SWFs AS3

Model: Beatriz Brazil
Website: http://beatrizbrazil.weebly.com/galle…

Check her out guys! A big thank you to Beatriz for the images!

Welcome to this tutorial! Today we are going to take a look at Loading Images and SWF files that are not actually in your Flash document dynamically using Actionscript 3.0.

This can be especially useful if you are creating a website or gallery with a lot of content as it gives your website user control over what actually gets loaded. Enjoy!

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Happy Day-After-Canada-Day everybody!

In today’s world design and aesthetic appeal change at a ridiculous rate, just keep tabs on fashion, any kind of imaging, the music industry, and main-stream advertising and you will see all kinds of different styles, colors, mixtures of style and color, flair, presentation and more changing all the time.

The same is true for web design. We all know by now that you can design a site that looks ancient (circa. 1998) and thankfully that “style”-or should I call it practicality- did not last for that, that long and we have moved on. We have moved into all kinds of visually moving, exciting, compelling designs. Many designs that use videos, animation, and high resolution imaging that was once only dreamed of.

As web designers we have a myriad of styles we work with and view all the time, just to list a few:

Web 2.0 (Shiny…EVERYTHING)

Grunge

Clean

Flash Sites that mix all kinds of stuff

Illustrative etc…

Moving beyond the over-arching style and feel of any given web site we see that to give that larger feeling of “Wow, this is a pretty sweet site!” a designer usually focuses on the finer points and in the case of this blog post I want to talk about icons, yes icons those tiny packages of -sometimes- incredible artwork. Icons are everywhere, literally everywhere on the web and in day to day activities.

The icon may have started as the humble bullet point and one day somebody had a flash of brilliance and decide the black circle/square wouldn’t cut it anymore, who knows… do you? Anyway the icon sure has come a long way since then serving all kinds of purposes in the web world these days.

From –yes- bullet points, to styling in toolbars, navigation links, counters and countless other things the icon is everywhere. Just look around you on the web, go to all your favorite sites both sites you use for functionality and sites you just like because they look good and you will notice the use of icons in virtually all of them.

I really believe the use of icons is one of the things that is often overlooked by young designers and it can really raise your game as far as designing is concerned. Who knew it, but those tiny packaged of art may well be your ticket to taking the next step in your work as a designer.

Lastly, let me know your thoughts on icons. Love em’? Hate em’? Never used em’? Or do you make em’? Give me your thoughts.

Well last up what would a post about icons be without actually including a couple sites that have them for free?!

http://www.vistaicons.com/

http://www.iconarchive.com/

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/03/06/35-really-incredible-free-icon-sets/

http://dryicons.com/free-icons/

http://webdesignledger.com/freebies/40-big-high-quality-apple-product-icons

http://icondrawer.com/free.php

Well Welcome to this wonderful, wacky Wednesday… OK yea, I threw “wacky” in there because I thought I was on a “W” roll for a moment, actually that reminds me of a pretty funny moment with one of my cousins which is completely NOT related with design, but maybe typography. My cousin was a few years old and learning the alphabet quite well with my Aunt showing him the letters and he eagerly would respond “that’s F!” or “that’s R!” and on and on until they got to-you guessed it- “W” to which he responded “that’s double ME!”. Ahh good times, but yes as promised totally unrelated to design.

Adobe Flash Catalyst:

Adobe rolled out Adobe Flash Catalyst Beta at the beginning of this month. I heard about it and looked into it a little and really liked what I saw. Basically Flash Catalyst is a program geared to designers who want to get in on the Flash fun without all the actionscript. Flash Catalyst does a great job of allowing you to import designs and layouts from Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and even Fireworks and preserve the layer order and further allow you to work with those layers and even add new elements. Interactivity can be added with ease, it’s merely a click or two of the mouse! After you have completed your masterpiece you can deploy (The fancy word for “export” or “save out to”) to the Flash Player or Adobe AIR. Very, very cool program from the folks at Adobe and I am sure most designers (and even some non-designers) will enjoy this program quite a bit.

You can download Flash Catalyst right here!

Check out a few screenshots from me working in Catalyst below.

Flash Catalyst! Click to open (you really needed that didn’t you?)

When you open Flash Catalyst it allows you to open a project, or start a new one from Photoshop or Illustrator.

Here I have imported the “myPhone” iPhone created in Photoshop with all its layers.

Make something happen when the slide button is pressed! In this case it will move to the next scene which is empty. This will make the phone disappear when the button is pressed.

Previewing… a browser window opens shortly hereafter and you get to test run your application!

Remember you can deploy this to Adobe Flash Player OR Adobe AIR so there is a lot of cool potential for Catalyst!

You can download Flash Catalyst right here!

Simon Plant:

Simons a great guy, great photographer and has been giving me a few free tutorials here and there to upload to my YouTube account, matter of fact I just checked and I have three I need to get up there! Anyway he sells a whole bunch of great high quality video tutorials/courses through his site. I strongly urge you to check them out they are inexpensive and hey, why not support a great photographer?!

Go ahead and send some love his way, way “across the pond” in the UK. Click here to check out the tutorials he offers with some cool preview videos as well!

Defining your site or local root folder as Dreamweaver calls it is the one thing you absolutely want to be able to do. Defining this root folder is the first step to using Dreamweaver very effectively and allowing Dreamweaver to manage your site for you and keep all of the links-everything from images to other pages-updated as you move pages, elements, and files around in your site.
Defining a root folder takes a lot of the headache out of managing a website and allows you to properly use Dreamweaver. We are using Dreamweaver CS4 in this video but you should be fine following up to several versions back. Have fun!

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Congrats to the winners! Thanks to all who took the time to participate!