Beginner AS3 classes

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Monday, January 26th, 2009

Starting tomorrow morning and continuing weekly on Tuesday mornings, we will be holding some beginner AS3 classes at 8 am.   The focus will be on designers who are familiar with the Flash IDE, but would like to increase their scripting abilities. Tomorrow will be covering the basic building blocks for AS3, then in following weeks work towards topics such as:• Dynamic loaders (percentage, progress bars, etc.)• Button rollovers (specifically reversing the rollover movie on roll out)• Dynamic photo loader (i.e. slideshow)• Dynamic scrolling menu (like Kaliedoscope’s or the Nu Skin timeline)It is recommended that you come with a laptop with Flash cs4 installed.  This will be more hands-on than theory.If you have questions, contact Bryce at bryceb at mediarain dot com

Flex Custom Component Lifecycle

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Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

The purpose of this post is to identify what the component lifecycle is and how to utilize it to create components that are efficient and re-usable. I will cover both the functions we need to override as well as the events that are dispatched along the way.

First, let’s start with a quiz.

1. True or False. I know what the lifecycle functions: createChildren(), commitProperties(), measure(), and updateDisplayList() are and I use them often in my custom component development.
2. True or False. I know what circumstances are appropriate for overriding commitProperties(), measure(), and updateDisplayList().
3. True or False. I know what deferred validation is and how it is used in the component lifecycle.
4. True or False. I know when the preinitialize, initialize, creationComplete, and updateComplete are dispatched relative to createChildren(), commitProperties(), measure(), and updateDisplayList().

If you answered false to any of the above questions, I will cover the answers next. So keep reading .

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