In as3 you play a sound by creating a Sound object, and calling its play() method. play() returns a SoundChannel object which has a soundTransform property that you can use to adjust the volume and panning of the playing sound. More

So, a recent project made me go out and find a solution to a problem that keeps coming up. More

As I mentioned in my previous entry, you hear "Favor composition over inheritance" all the time. I see the point of defaulting to composition over inheritance, but it can be a huge pain if you're trying to incorporate a large number of the composed class' functions. More

In programming, you hear "Favor composition over inheritance" alot. If you're unfamiliar with these terms, here's a quick primer: More

I was working on a test Drupal site in Windows XP using XAMPP and it was running really slow.  Status Reports showed the following error:

HTTP request status Fails
Your system or network configuration
does not allow Drupal to access web pages, resulting in reduced More

08-26-2009 Update: YouTube recently made an undocumented change to their API. Now, the upload URL you get in step 6 will be at the domain "uploads2.gdata.youtube.com". The crossdomain.xml file at this domain prevents flash from uploading to it. More

So I've been getting some questions about text links in as3 lately, so I'll blog about it.

If you want just a simple text link from dynamic text in as3, here's your solution. This is only good for clicks, not for mouseovers, but i do have another solution for that.

First set the text:

textFieldName.html = "I want either a Large pizza or a Extra Large pizza";

Next add the TextEvent Listener with the event Link and the method: More

textFieldName.addEventListener(TextEvent.LINK, textLinkHandler);

function textLinkHandler(e:TextEvent):void {
    switch(e.text) {
        case "large":
            trace("Make it a LARGE");
        break;

Sometimes, we have links in our flash movies that open in new windows. This can trigger annoying pop-up blocker messages, because to the browser it looks like your flash movie is trying to open a new window without the user asking for it by means of a click or keypress.

More

ShortcutManager is an AS3 class to make it easier to add and manage keyboard shortcuts in a flash movie.

Documentation is at http://curiousmedia.com/docs/as3/com/curiousmedia/ui/package-detail.html  The docs aren't very filled out at this point, but hopefully the naming scheme gives you enough information.

Shortcut Manager provides the following benefits: More

• Simplifies the creation of shortcuts, especially multi-key shortcuts
• Simplifies adding/changing shortcuts at run time
• Lets you name and organize shortcuts
• Lets you check if a given shortcut already exists, or if a function has a shortcut associated with it

If you have more than one movieClip/graphic with the exact same same size and position on the stage, JAWS will not read them correctly. When I tried this, JAWS gave them all the name of the top clip. Using Microsoft's MSAA tools, I inspected the clips, and their name properties were correct, so I think this is a bug with JAWS, rather than Flash Player.

To workaround this issue, give your clips slightly different positions. 1 pixel difference is enough for JAWS to label them correctly.