www.kirupa.com Tutorials

Introduction to 3D Using Flash CS4
Learn how to use Flash CS4's 3D tools to take your content and easily manipulate them in a 3d space.

Displaying Google Maps in Flash
Learn how to use the Google Maps API to display directions between two points using a bit of AS3 in Flash.

Hyperlinks in AS3
Learn how to create hyperlinks in AS3 by using the URLRequest and navigateToURL tag-team duo. It's hard to create an app of any real substance these days without creating hyperlinks that load a URL when the user clicks on them. These could just be links that open a new web page, launch your e-mail app for sending an e-mail, or any other type of crazy thing you would want to do with URLs. In this article, I will briefly show you how to use ActionScript 3.0 (AS3) to create a hyperlink

Using the Keyboard in AS3
Learn all about the KeyboardEvent and how to detect which key was pressed in AS3. With keyboards, because you have many keys to deal with, in most programming languages, you often have a few extra steps before you can detect which key was pressed. Don't worry, this tutorial will show you how you can use the keyboard and its keys in AS3.

Using the Drop Shadow Filter in AS3
Flash has had what are known as filters for quite a while. Filters are basically pre-made visual effects you can apply to your movie clips, and you probably know them more commonly as just Blur, Drop Shadow, Glow, Bevel, etc. Learn how to programmatically set and modify the properties of the drop shadow filter on an element.

Random Colors in AS3
Learn how to generate random colors and apply them to objects programmatically. In this short article, I will describe how you can randomly generate random colors along with my personal preference on how you can do this in a semi-random fashion.

Dynamic Mouse Trail in Flash
Learn how to create a cool mouse trail effect that gets dynamically generated as your mouse moves. A popular effect that you can add to your applications is a mouse trail. In case you are not familiar with them, mouse trails are nothing more than some content that follows your mouse around the screen. What makes them a little different from a standard "follow mouse" effect is that they often trail your mouse movement by a few milliseconds. This has the effect of providing you with the illusion of your mouse cursor leaving behind a trail of where it has been in the past.

Custom 404 Page Not Found Pages
A cool trick you can entice your visitors with is custom error pages. When a page on your server is not found, your visitors will normally see their browser's default message such as "Page cannot be displayed." If you used a custom error page though, your visitors will see your page.

Popular Web Tricks
A really cool feature that web designers overlook is the use of the .htaccess file. Simply put, whenever you see a custom error page (404, 403, etc.), use server side includes, restrict IPs, load a default page, or do any host of events invisible to the user, you are probably going to be using .htaccess.

Getting to Grips with mySQL
This tutorial will show you how to create and query a database using SQL and the mySQL command terminal.

Backing Up/Restoring MySQL Databases
If you happen to have data stored in a MySQL database, it is good for you to learn how to backup and restore the database.

Simple If...Else Tests
There's a very useful shortcut in if...else tests when you test whether a variable equals 0 or not. But you have to know how to use the ! operator. This operator is used to invert a boolean.

Passing Variables to Flash
In this tutorial I will explain how to pass variables to flash and what dynamic things you could do with passing variables.

Functions
There are times when you will want to have a section of ActionScript code reused. In those cases, functions play an important role. A function is a section of code that can be reused throughout your movie, and it can be varied depending on the data you input to the function.

AS 2.0 Variable Hints
This short article is on variable naming in the new Actionscript 2.0 (and 1.0, I guess).

Commenting Your Code
Most of the best programmers on the world will tell you that: always comment on your code. For yourself and for the others.

Naming Conventions
The naming scheme of your movie is very important for readability purposes.

Global Variables
Global variables are useful when you want a variable to be accessible from anywhere in your movie, even in different scenes.

Var Declaration
This is not a very important issue for small movies, but it is a good thing to think about it.

Variable Scope
One of the first problems programmers encountered when switching from Flash 5 to Flash MX was the variables scope.