Starting out on my Flash journey (again)
Now that the sun has come out and my employer’s training budget is large, I’ve decided to revist Flash and get my Actionscript skills up to scratch.
The last time I used Flash, as a naïve gen Xer looking to embrace the web, it was in version 2. Which sucked. But it was fun to fool around with things which, back then, were thought of as impossible to do with JavaScript and CSS alone such as smooth animation, timelines and pretty colours.
These days you can manipulate sound, images and video to such an extent that it’s made Flash the most ubiquitous piece of web software out there.
Not to mention that Flash skills are becoming more and more sought after from a Frontender.
So my quest starts with a very simple image gallery written nearly entirely in Actionscript (2.0 because we only have Flash 8 available to us at the moment) that reads the contents of an xml file.
The next step will be to write a class that builds thumbnails on the fly to an interactive thumbnail scroller for better browsing. At the moment you can only navigate left and right by hovering over the image itself.
It’s basic, but it’s a start for me back into the cool world of rich media.
Check out the simple image gallery.
Tags: actionscript, flash, gallery