ActionScript 3 interactive objects tutorial (CS3)

Draft

This article or section is currently under construction

In principle, someone is working on it and there should be a better version in a not so distant future.
If you want to modify this page, please discuss it with the person working on it (see the "history")

Overview

Learning goals

Learn about the most important interactive ActionScript 3 objects

Learn some methods and properties you may want to use in your animations.

Prerequisites

Flash CS3 desktop tutorial

Flash drawing tutorial

Flash button tutorial

Flash components tutorial

ActionScript 3 event handling tutorial

Moving on

ActionScript 3 interactive objects tutorial

The Flash article has a list of other tutorials.

Quality

This text should technical people get going and may not be good enough for self-learning beginners. It can be used as handout in a "hands-on" class. That is what Daniel K. Schneider made it for...

Level

It aims at Flash design beginners, not beginning ActionScript 3 programmers, although programmers can read this to get a quick overview before digging into a real documentation like Adobe's Flash 9 reference manual

Learning materials

Grab the various *.fla files from here:

http://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/flash/ex/action-script-3-intro/

Interactive objects - an overview

The ActionScript 3.0 flash.display package defines a whole lot of different kinds of visual objects that can appear in the Flash Player.

Below is summary table of ActionScript 3 interactive display objects. It shows that interactive objects are defined as hierarchical classes. Methods and properties that work for a parent class (e.g. Sprite) also will work for its child classes (e.g. UIComponent). Links point to the technical reference manual at Adobe.

• DisplayObject
  • InteractiveObject
    • DisplayObjectContainer
      • Loader
      • Sprite
        • FLVPlayback FLVPlayback]
        • FLVPlaybackCaptioning
        • MovieClip
        • UIComponent
          • BaseButton
          • BaseScrollPane
          • ColorPicker
          • ComboBox
          • IndeterminateBar
          • Label
          • NumericStepper
          • ProgressBar
          • ScrollBar
          • Slider
          • TextArea
          • TextInput
          • UILoader
      • Stage
    • SimpleButton
    • TextField
  • Non-interactive display classes are AVM1Movie, Bitmap, MorphShape, Shape, StaticText and Video ...

Links

Important manual pages

These are almost impossible to understand for non programmers, but otherwise the documentation at Adobe is excellent.

• InteractiveObject. This InteractiveObject class is the abstract base class for all display objects with which the user can interact, using the mouse and keyboard. Most Events are documented here. (Make sure to list also the inherited events).