Flash Magazine > Tutorials

The Power of Arrays II - Methods of Arrays

First, I would like to apologize for the delay in getting this follow up tutorial to you all, and I really appreciate all the emails I received about my first tutorial, they were very encouraging.

The Power of Arrays III - Nested Arrays: What they are, and how to use them

This is the final installment of the "Power of Arrays" tutorials and it will cover nested arrays. Before we get into what nested arrays are, let's go over how the text will appear throughout the tutorial.

Breadcrumbs: Timed Functions

In the days of Flash 5 timing calls to functions required complicated tweaks using the onClipEvent. Flash MX has improved on this by providing a method that calls your function on a set interval.

Unit Testing ActionScript 2.0 Using AS2Unit

In the inaugural article of the Engineering RIAs series, Steven explained that Macromedia has positioned its Flash Technology as the key enabler in the development of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). With the recent release of Flash MX 2004, Flash has been further catapulted to the forefront of this exciting new area of Enterprise Software Development. While there is little doubt that Rich Internet Applications gives us many benefits over traditional web based applications, it does increase the complexity of the client side development. This increased complexity necessitates the introduction of development practices regarded as the norm in the development of server side Enterprise applications using technologies such as J2EE and .NET. One of these key practices is Unit Testing.

What About Flash? Can We Really Make Games With It?

We've heard this story before: big-game developer gets tired of big-game team size, pressure, and politics, and switches to making small games. New companies filled with people escaping the retail AAA industry, developing these "casual" games, are popping up all the time.

Conclusion

Let's see how Flash stacks up to our original requirements:

Developing with Flash

What's different about developing for Flash than a roll-our-own engine?

What is a Flash Game?

Say we decide to use Flash. We now have a bunch of MP3, SWF, and XML files. What's next? We need to be able to play these back somehow, which means using the Flash Player. But it's missing features such as fullscreen mode, support for right-click, and reading and writing save games.

Flash Resources

Flash has an enormous community, with people of all skill levels, from many backgrounds. These aren't just amateur web designers messing around with a few buttons and animations for a silly menu navigation bar.