eric j. forman | blog

TUTORIAL: http://monkeyflash.com/tutorials/flash-drag-and-drop/

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (장영혜중공업) is a Seoul-based Web art group consisting of Marc Voge (U.S.A.) and Young-hae Chang (Korea). Their work, presented in 14 languages, is characterized by text-based animation composed in Adobe Flash that is highly synchronized to a musical score that is often original and typically jazz.

http://www.yhchang.com/

http://intihuatani.usc.edu/cloud/flowing/

Download source

Notes on the code:

• buttonMode tells a Sprite (MovieClip) if it should behave like a button or not. Event listeners will still work without it, but normal interaction standards won’t apply, e.g. the cursor won’t change to a hand.
• There’s a custom hit area inside the movieclip, it’s alpha is set to 0 so you can’t see it, but outline mode is turned on for that layer to make it easier to see its shape.
• The custom hit area is set on frame 1 inside the movieclip with this.hitArea = circle;
• Without the custom hit area, the shape of the butterfly would be the hit area and as it rotated the mouse would trigger it on and off, making confusing jumps. Comment out the above line to test this.
• By setting mouseChildren to false, you can treat any complex compositions of objects as one mouse target, even if the inner items would otherwise be clickable.

See Homework page for tutorials explaining the concept.

http://vixy.net

http://fc01.deviantart.com/fs13/f/2007/077/2/e/Animator_vs__Animation_by_alanbecker.swf

http://www.wefail.com/

http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=651

I have cleaned up the code a bit and added comments to help clarify. To reiterate: you don’t need a separate channel for each sound (up to 32 sounds can play in one channel). You can make separate channels if you want independent control over sounds, or groups of sounds.

Download the FLA again from here: soundExample.fla. Make a folder called “sounds” wherever you are saving the FLA and use your own mp3s and change the filenames in the code. Or you can download the mp3′s i put up inside the “sounds” folder.

Many people are confused about what the hit area in a button is. It is the boundary within which the button recognizes mouse interaction. It is NOT the click frame, Flash refers to clicking as Down, as in Mouse Button Down. By default the hit area is the combined shape of whatever is inside the button. So you don’t need to make one if that works for you. But you can customize it by creating a keyframe on the hit frame and making a shape. This is useful for bitmaps whose backgrounds you don’t want clickable, or, say, making only the head of a person clickable. Here is an example, download the source file and look inside the button symbols:

Hit Area Example

Source file FLA

Man In The Dark by Milton Manetas and Aaron Russ Clinger

Yugop – expert actionscripter

Interface experiment without clicking

Paul Neave

Flash design examples (mostly commercial work): TheFWA.com

Flash design examples (more artsy): strangefruits

Flash design examples (computational): Levitated