mp3 player – ActionScript

Hey for anyone that reads this. It has been a little bit, but I have a new code snippet for ya’s. It’s a pretty simple mp3 player that you could easily embedded on a site.

Here’s there script (link). It uses a pretty simple XML also.

<song>
<t st=”songtitle” l=”url” a=”artist” />
</song>

Give it a whirl. I will be trying to remake it with a slider on the next version and make it smaller.

Wishlist for next gen of social networks

So today I was playing around with Facebook and every few days it draws closer to what I really want to see social networks to become like.  So I am going to list for you want I really really want to see in the next gen of social networks.

• Email
• RSS
• Online docs
• Blog
• IM
• Communities/Networks
• Persistent messaging system
• Calender

Pretty much take everything Google does, add it to the core of facebook and give it a descent desktop app and you’re set.  But the biggest problem would be not limiting the service you allow people to connect to. If I want to use bloglines, Gmail, Zoho, and WordPress I should be able to.

So that list isn’t just things I want to see aggregated, but features that allow me to interact with them. So I can post to my blog, mark favorites on my RSS stream, create,edit, delete docs, or add events to my calender. I also want to have trusted friend able to edited or add things using the central system.

I don’t see the feature of social networks as just a place to gather and stalk what friends are doing, a centralized portal to who I am and linked to on the internet. I am really excited for the google social network, not because I think it will necessarily be better than Facebook, but because it will be good and it will (hopefully) be real competition for facebook and push the development of Social networks.

Fade background color in new color : actionscript

Have ya ever wanted to change your background color during runtime using actionscript instead of having a timeline event? Did you by any change want to have it fade from it’s current color to the new color with the click of a button?

Well, if so today’s your lucky day. For a site I’m working on I needed to make the buttons when clicks change the background color, so I set out to do it. The first and pretty much only problem I encountered was when you changed the background it would show the stage background and not the last color showed. So if I click red and then clicked orange I would want it to fade from red to orange. Well what I was getting was red, white, then fade to orange. But after about 15 minutes or so of playing I figured out a way around it.

So anyways, it works now and you can easily change the speed of fade by changing the alpha added to itself. Here’s the link. Hope it’s of some use to ya’s ^_^

XML driven drop down menu

Well I’m working from home today, and I has given the task of creating a XML driven drop down menu. Now, I have been trying to figure this one out for a while and I think I have finally figured out a way to finally pull it off. My biggest problem has been actually making the url go somewhere since I was building the clip within a clip. After trying to figure out a way to use an inner clips mouse events and failing I moved on to just creating a bunch of MCs.

Which worked except that the menus wouldn’t stay open. But I think I figured it out! I think if I use a hit test to see if I’m over one of the sub menus it should work.

I will of course post my code up as soon as I get it working.

asfunction – Use more than one variable!

So I was trying to use asfunction to pass two variables, well because I needed two. So after a few hours of looking for a pre-existing script to do this or some other way to do it I just do frustrated and wrote my own script that will let me pass (theoretically) as many variables as my heart desires.

It’s a rather simple/small script that plays off how asfunction treats all text after the first comma as a string. So realizing this you can use special characters (I use a comma) to separate your variables. You then pass the single string that contains your vars to a function that searchers for that special char and breaks the string apart and puts your vars into an array.

Get it? Simple, eh?

Anyways, link to source script.