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Second steps with ActionScript 3

Update 3:

This is a very old page imported from my previous blog. If there is missing content below or anything that doesn’t make sense then please check the page on my old blog.

Update 2:

These examples were created with the very first beta of actionscript 3 and run on the very first beta of the flash player 8.5. Unfortunately they don’t work on any release version of the player because of changes Macromedia/ Adobe made.

Update:

Check out part 3 of this series on my experiences with ActionScript 3.

I have taken my first attempt at ActionScript 3 and refined it a little… The first attempt was a very simple mosaic tool which created a mosaic from a jpeg. In this version I have improved it in a number of ways:

I now first blur each section of the image to get more of an average colour for each tile. This was a good excuse to use one of the flash.filters.* in AS and also gives a slightly better looking result. It still isn’t perfect but I spent quite a while searching the web and couldn’t find any good algorithms to find the average colour of a given bitmap (I’m sure they exist though – if you know one please leave some info in the comments).

I also decided to make the example a little bit more exciting by adding some movement to it. I initally did this by using the mx.effects classes but then I realised that these were adding 210KB to my file (unless I missed a “SimpleTween” class somewhere?). I presume that is because they depend on the whole Flex Framework but in this case (where my swf does pretty much what I want at 2KB) it seemed like some unnecessary overhead.

So I wrote a very simple little Tween class based on the new flash.util.Timer class and borrowed one of Robert Penner’s easing equations

So here is the resulting swf (note that you will need the flash player 8.5 to view it and that the movement happens when the swf loads so you may have to refresh the page to see it move):

And here is the ActionScript to make that swf:

If you compare it to my previous effort you will see that it is pretty similar… The additions are the BlurFilter and the new Tween class… They should be clear enough… The Tween class is very quickly knocked together and isn’t meant to be a proper generic replacement for the Macromedia ones but I think that such a beast may be necessary if the Macromedia ones are going to create such big files… Hopefully the next version of the zigo tween kit from Moses Supposes will include support for AS3…

Anyway – any comments on the code or suggestions for improvement appreciated :)

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