Well, hey there, hearty ActionScript Journeyman! You’ve traversed many a strange landscape so far over the last 6 months, but if all went according to plan, you emerged stronger and readier to face the next challenge. Here with the 7th installment, we’ll culminate with the topic of XML.

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This tutorial came about after looking online for help with the very same topic. A lot of people seem to be asking the same question, but it was hard to find a neatly packaged set of instructions to follow.

So, like any decent netizen, I cobbled together this article, gaining inspiration from a couple of other blogs and using experience from some trial and error on my own. And now I offer it to you, hoping this will end your own search.

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In this sixth installment of AS3 101, we’ll be studying topics related to the “Display List”, Flash’s rendering system. With a solid understanding of how to program the Display List, a whole world of dynamic possibilities open up. You will no longer be tied to static display structure that you create on the timeline in the IDE, but you can create and destroy MovieClips (and more) with code.

There is much to know, so we’d better get started. Our ultimate goal is a wall of clickable images (go and check out the demo). While simple, it introduces many Display List programming techniques.

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There is an all too familiar compulsion among digital designers to identify with their tool of choice. This is unfortunate because, when it comes to Flash, one tool that is invariably overlooked is Fireworks CS4.

In this tutorial, you’ll discover how Fireworks CS4 can be used to speed up your workflow in Flash and, at the same time, help a neon sign located on the wall of a run down theatre in Los Angeles flicker forlornly on a rather busy street.

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Flash is known for delivering rich interactive experiences with a lot of “eye-candy”. Often, this eye-candy is achieved by means of animation and Flash has great animating capabilities. During this tutorial we’ll discuss tweening; Flash’s automated animation.

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Welcome back to AS3 101, the fifth edition! At this point, you should be comfortable with the concepts of variables, functions, conditionals (branching), and Arrays. Not only should you be comfortable with the concepts, but you should also be fluent in how ActionScript 3 implements these concepts.

For this fifth episode, we’ll be adding to that catalog of skills the various looping structures found in AS3. You’ll find some dependencies on the information learned in AS3 101 Part 4, on Arrays, so if you’ve skipped that one or need a refresher, please review that tutorial before continuing with this one.

For our final project, we’ll combine loops and arrays, to make a simple shoot-em-up game.

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In this installment of AS3 101, we’ll spend the entire tutorial exploring a single type of data available to most programming languages: the Array.

Arrays are ways to keep lists of values. Arrays are useful to keep an arbitrary number of related items grouped together, and can represent complex data structures though nesting. In ActionScript, Arrays have quite a bit of flexibility and functionality, as we’ll see. After the usual abstract introduction, we’ll apply what we’ve learned (whilst also learning some more along the way) by building a rather simple puzzle game.

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In this tutorial I’ll explain about the ActionScript 3.0 Event Framework. After this tutorial you should have a clear understanding of how events, event dispatchers and event listeners work.

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In our third installment of AS3 101, we meet the brains of the operation. All applications need to have at least a little logic built in, so that is what we’re talking about: branching. We’ll meet the if statement, the switch statement and a little something called the lookup table (or hash map).

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This is part 2 of the introduction to ActionScript 3.0 series. We’ll be talking about functions. Just like last time, when we focused on variables, we’ll be primarily targeting the neophyte programmer, who has little to no experience with functions. However, even if you’re relatively comfortable with functions, you may want to skim through this tutorial if certain aspects of them – like datatypes and default values – aren’t quite sitting well with you.

We’ll spend the first half of the tutorial covering things at a more theoretical level, then put some of those ideas to use in the second half. We’ll be building a very simple piece with a series of buttons which swap out the content on another part of the page. There’ll be a few functions in use to accomplish this, primarily one that handles the setting of the content. Make yourself comfortable, go and take a look at the demo, then get stuck into the tut..

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