© 2011 Delmar, Cengage Learning Chapter 10 Using ActionScript to Enhance User Experience

Chapter 10 Lessons 1.Create complex interactivity 2.Load movies at runtime 3.Work with conditional actions 4.Use ActionScript to create external links © 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning

Use ActionScript to Enhance User Experience Introduction –You can use ActionScript to enhance the user experience by: 1.Replacing the mouse cursor with a custom cursor 2.Tracking user interactions and offer feedback based on the data you gather 3.Breaking your movies into smaller movies

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Use ActionScript to Enhance User Experience Introduction –Creating conditional actions to implement complex branching in your movies –Creating looping actions to help streamline your ActionScript –Providing a way to repeat a set of actions based on a value provided by the user or on a task you want the user to perform

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Tools You’ll Use Use ActionScript to Enhance User Experience

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Create Complex Interactivity Creating a custom cursor is a fun way for you to make a Flash site distinctive. You can integrate a custom cursor with the purpose of the site. The custom cursor can be a graphic, photograph, or even an animation.

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Create Complex Interactivity When you are implementing a custom cursor, the first step is to hide the regular cursor, using the mouse.hide method. Then you display the custom cursor which means you will have two cursors on the stage, but only the custom cursor is visible.

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Create Complex Interactivity You need to set up an event listener that “listens” for when the mouse moves. Mouse movement is tracked by mouseX and mouseY properties. As the user moves the mouse, the mouseX and mouseY values are updated constantly to reflect the current position.

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Create Complex Interactivity ActionScript to create a custom cursor by setting X and Y coordinates myCursor is the instance name of the custom cursor movie clip symbol The mouse X and Y coordinates are passed to the custom cursor

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Create Complex Interactivity In ActionScript 3.0, you have the ability to reuse lines of code. This is especially applicable to functions (which are made up of blocks of code). You can have one event listener that calls (executes) the same function for more than one object.

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Create Complex Interactivity Three objects that call the same function These three objects call the same function, clickToDrag event.target refers to whichever object calls the function

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Create Complex Interactivity ActionScript includes an if action that can test whether certain conditions have been met and, if so, can perform other actions.

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Create Complex Interactivity Conditional statements offer many possibilities for building more interactive movies. You should enclose all the actions you want Flash to carry out in braces following the if action. If the conditions are not met, the actions in the braces are ignored.

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Create Complex Interactivity Three objects that call the same function This action is only carried out when it is equal to 9

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Create Complex Interactivity The Display list is a list of all the items that will be visible on the screen in a Flash document, including: movie clips, drawn shapes, text fields, videos, and bitmaps. These items are Display Object types.

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Create Complex Interactivity Some of these display objects can have children. It is important, when you are referring to an object in ActionScript, to specify whether an object is a child or a parent.

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Create Complex Interactivity Three objects that call the same function This is checking to see if the mySquare object has been dropped on top of the parent (a movie clip) of the targetSquare object

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Create Complex Interactivity One aspect of interactivity involves responding to user actions, such as jumping to a different point in a movie when a user clicks a button. Another aspect involves providing users with individual feedback based on the actions they take or information they supply.

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Create Complex Interactivity When you collect information it presents many opportunities to offer user custom feedback. When you track interactions it can also provide you with insight on the way people work with your site or application.

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Create Complex Interactivity The increment and decrement actions are useful when you are tracking user interactions. –The increment action ++ (two plus signs) adds 1 unit to a variable or expression –The decrement action - - (two minus signs) subtracts 1 unit

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Load Movies at Runtime When you create multiple movies they create smoother transitions between pages because the new movies load into the current HTML page A Flash site that takes advantage of using multiple movies

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Load Movies at Runtime Using multiple movies can help you keep organized during development of a movie, especially if different people are working on different parts of the movie. You can use the Loader class along with the addChild method to load an external movie, graphic, text block, or sound.

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Load Movies at Runtime When you are creating a link to a file, you can include an absolute path, which specifies the exact location of the file. A relative path indicates the location based on the current location of your movie file.

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Load Movies at Runtime ActionScript for loading an SWF file in the same location as the Flash document Code to load fish.swf file

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Load Movies at Runtime You can load a new movie with the original document or into a movie clip symbol. If you load a movie with the original document, the new movie inherits the frame rate, dimensions, and background color of the original document.

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Load Movies at Runtime You can use the removeChild method to unload movies which will create smoother transitions between movies. When you unload a movie, it is removed from the player but it is still available to be replayed without having to download it again.

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Work with Conditional Actions ActionScript includes the else statement you can use to create more sophisticated branching. An else statement lets you specify one set of actions to run if a condition is true, and an alternate set to run if the condition is false.

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Work with Conditional Actions If a condition has more than two possible states, you can use the else if to set up a series of possible branches ActionScript using else if statements to create multiple branches

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Work with Conditional Actions You may not want passwords to be visible onscreen as users enter them. Instead you can set an input text field to display asterisks rather than the actual keystrokes being typed by the user. You can generate x and y Stage coordinate values for an object’s position using the Math.random function.

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Use ActionScript to Create External Links Many websites contain links to other sites and you might want to create links to lead the user to a related site or just to another site you want to share. The URLRequest class along with the navigateToUL function lets you open another file or jump from a button or a movie clip symbol to another website.

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning ActionScript to display a website Use ActionScript to Create External Links

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Use ActionScript to Create External Links When you use the URLRequest to lead to another website, you must supply the URL for the file. Make sure you include the entire URL, including the protocol prefix, for example, which is known as an absolute path.

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning Use ActionScript to Create External Links You can also use URLRequest to create an link from a button or a movie clip symbol. To create an link, you need to include mailto: and then the address in the URL field of the URLRequest statement. If you want to create an link from text, not a button or movie clip symbol, you can use the Properties panel.

© 2011 Delmar Cengage Learning New message window for a mailto:link Use ActionScript to Create External Links To: field filled in with the address you specify