Robotlegs is a light-weight, pure AS3 micro-architecture that has developed some intense devotion amongst the Flash community recently. Created by Shaun Smith, it provides a mechanism for wiring your objects together in a decoupled way, and through the use of automated metadata based dependency injection, Robotlegs removes boilerplate code in an application. If you’re familiar [...]

In this final installment of my series of tutorials on using Ant with Flex Builder, I’ll show you how to create a Preloader asset in the Flash IDE and export that as a SWC to be used in your Actionscript source code. 1. Download tutorial files To begin this tutorial, please make sure you have [...]

Part 4b of the Ant series expands on Part 4a by adding a Flash UI Component to the SWC. Please review Part 4a before proceeding with this tutorial. 1. Download tutorial files To begin this tutorial, please make sure you have set up your workspace as suggested in Part 1. View Demo Download Source Files

First off, if you’ve been waiting for this installment of my series of tutorials on Ant, I offer my sincere apologies. I’ve been sidetracked by iPhone development and haven’t been able to find time to finish off these tutorials. As promised, here’s a follow up to my previous tutorials. In Part 4a, I shall show [...]

In Part 3 of this tutorial, we shall use a combination of the MXMLC compiler and JSFL script to compile an external SWF which will be loaded into your main SWF. 1. Download tutorial files To begin this tutorial, please make sure you have set up your workspace as suggested in Part 1. View Demo [...]

In Part 2 of this tutorial, we’ll compile an ActionScript 3 only project simply by launching the MXMLC compiler with an Ant task in Flex Builder. 1. Download tutorial files To begin this tutorial, please make sure you have set up your workspace as suggested in Part 1. View Demo Download Source Files

As more Flash developers migrate towards using tools like Flex Builder and FDT for code editing, some of us have found that switching between the Flash IDE and Flex Builder doesn’t necessarily present the most seamless workflow. Compiling with the Flash IDE is slow and cumbersome; building an entire Flash project with code in Flex [...]

If you’re thinking of hosting your SWFs on a content delivery network to improve the performance of your Flash application, or attempting to load a third-party SWF hosted on another domain into your application, be aware that loading and scripting SWFs from another domain posts a whole set of security issues, namely that of Cross-Domain [...]

At a recent FlashCodersNY meeting where the discussion centered around the subject of the MVC (Model-View-Controller) design pattern, it struck me that a lot of Flash developers, especially those coming from design backgrounds, did not see the value in using the MVC design pattern. Well, I’m not here to make the case for using MVC [...]