The Grego » actionscript 3

2011 Work in Review

Greg Kepler — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 02:26:40 +0000

2011 was an interesting year for me professionally. It was my first one where I was employed for all 12 months by The Barbarian Group. There was minimal freelance work and the stuff that I did do was chosen very carefully. This year was devoted to learning a lot of new things.

Loading External Across Domains in Flash

Greg Kepler — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 20:34:06 +0000

I feel like I’ve run into this issue so many times and either fixed it by accident or came up with some other solution in order to do the same thing. This time I cam to a conclusion that I understand and hopefully other people can use.

The Problem:

You create an flash app for the web which loads in data from a variety of other external sites, such as thumbnails from an aggregated feed using a 3rd party API and it works swimmingly while you’re testing locally. As soon as you put it on a remote server, you get a Flash Player security error, perhaps something like:

SecurityError: Error #2122: Security sandbox violation: LoaderInfo.content:http://staging.site.com/project/Main.swf cannot access http://www.website.com/image.jpg. A policy file is required, but the checkPolicyFile flag was not set when this media was loaded.
    at flash.display::LoaderInfo/get content()
    at com.gregkepler.testProject.imageloader::ImageLoader/onImageLoad()

Depending on if you’re ready for this error or not, you may not get a popup and can fail silently.

Thoughts on RobotLegs

Greg Kepler — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 17:32:22 +0000

Recently, you may have read and heard a lot of people talking about Robotlegs. Well maybe you haven’t, but if you’re a dork like me, you probably have. And even dorkier of me, I find it actually really exciting and has changed how I approach programming. For those of you who don’t know what Robotlegs is, [...]

GridFitType

Greg Kepler — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 17:46:59 +0000

Sometimes, you need to use a dynamic textfield in flash where it’s necessary or more convenient to create the textfield completely dynamically (not placed on the stage in a movieclip in the library). You style your text nicely and set up everything so that it looks just right and then when you go to animate [...]

Thoughts on Pure MVC

Greg Kepler — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 12:46:44 +0000

Recently, I used the Pure MVC framework for the first time on a project at Iomedia and it opened my mind to the right ways, wrong ways, and new ways to structure a project in Flash. Before I get into the pros and cons, I want want to first warn any of you that are new to using frameworks in general that there is some studying involved in order to fully wrap your mind around how this thing works. But it's totally worth it.

Oscars 09 Ballot project

Greg Kepler — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 03:15:43 +0000

I have a new flash project up that I’ve been working on for a few months on and off. http://www.gregkepler.com/oscars09/ This is an Oscars ballot site that was set up for my family and friends. I used a bit of practical Papervision3D for the ballot selection and Aftereffects for the transitions. It was a fun project, but [...]

Getting stop() to stop

Greg Kepler — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 02:57:57 +0000

In as3, the introduction to of the display list has made the stop() method a little less straightforward. Traditionally, when you used stop() on the timeline of a movieclip, it would do just that, stop the playhead from playing past where that script is. To be fare, this does still work, but only if you [...]

Adding Dynamically Named Library Items to the Display List

Greg Kepler — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 18:24:07 +0000

To add a library item to a display object using as3, here is the basic method: var dynamicClass:Class = getDefinitionByName("libraryName") as Class; var mcFromLibrary:MovieClip = new dynamicClass(); addChild(mcFromLibrary); dynamicClass is a variable typed as a Class returns a reference to the class object of the class specified by the name parameter. “libraryName” [...]