emotionalmarkup

If you haven’t heard, Papervision is a 3D class library for Flash. For non-maths heads like me, it’s fairly complex to get your head around. To make it even worse, the documentation is sparse, but there are some good tutorials out there. Check out gotoandlearn.

I’ve followed a guide created by Mark Walters to create my own Earth and Moon scene using Papervision for AS3. It’s basic I guess, but I’m only learning.

I’ve found that sometimes in Firefox at home, I needed to refresh the page to make the Earth appear. Not sure why.  Also, for all the astronomers, the dimensions and distances are probably way off. I was lucky to get it to work, so back off!

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.