Genre: elearning | English | 332 MB

High Definition Video tutorials for Actionscript 3 in Adobe Flash

Take two! This is the second version of a page flip gallery I’ve made for the site and one that I think is MUCH improved from its predecessor. I’ll address why in a second, but lets look at some of the features of this one….

* XML based…. So you can specify the gallery’s image or swf locations and title details from an XML document. Plus this makes it easy to update your gallery without republishing the swf file. And also easy to re-arrange the order of the pages. Just move XML tags up or down

* File types… The gallery can load png, jpg, gif, or swf’s (with video)

* Index buttons…. The tutorial teaches how to create index buttons to jump anywhere within the book.

And as usual you get to see all the code written that makes the magic above happen. Also the first hour will appeal to first time Flash users because it teaches everything about creating the look of the book AND animating the pages. So if you wanted to spend more time animating each page than I did during the lesson, that’s totally up to you. I made the pages turn fairly quick just because animating each page onscreen was getting a bit tedious.

Some history on the first page flip lesson…

I loved teaching the original Actionscript 2 version of this gallery, and I really liked the final look of it, but what surprised me was that students were using it for their entire website. Which I didn’t think would occur when I created the lesson. I figured it would be a side gallery on a site, one that might open in a new window, and have a few images and that was it. So when I started getting emails from customers showing me that their site content was totally enclosed in that setup, it wasn’t hard to guess why they were emailing… “HALP! my site takes FOREVER to load”. Users were stuffing all of their images and text into one movieclip, which was causing the Flash file to wait at that first frame with that movieclip of all the pages. The remedy was to point people to this free preloader lesson on how to preload their content (fortunately the lesson was setup well in case that was needed). So that was the first thing that irked me about the Actionscript 2 gallery, I didn’t foresee its use as an entire site. The second issue was the navigation. Many people just wanted normal back and forward arrows to move around (instead of rolling over the page corners) And they also wanted an index, which was possible of course (anything is possible) but wasn’t taught fully. So anyway, that’s what led me to create this second, improved version (I think!)