Daryl Teo

I subscribe to the Papervision3D RSS feed, and once in awhile something interesting comes along and gets me thinking. This recent entry was as such: a gallery of sites that utilise Papervision3D to create new, innovative graphical user interfaces for their users. Looking at them got me psyched up to start on my own (long overdue) site.

However, going through some of the sites raised a common issue, and that issue is one of userability.

History

As someone in the comments noted, History repeats itself. Looking back to the early days of gratuitous .gif animations, unusable Flash websites, and then to the more recent AJAX revolution of Web2.0. Whenever something innovative comes forward, people struggle to find “proper” use for it, and instead end up throwing it all at the user in the hope that they will be “shocked and awed” by it. Perhaps, in the Dark Ages of Web1.0, this strategy would have worked (and it did, for a time). However, people on the internet are now tech-savvy: they want their stuff, and they know how to get it. To prevent them from doing so in any way would be a death-sentence to any website. (more…)

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Introduction

I write this article because it seems to me that quite a few people still have no idea how to duplicate external assets (such as duplicating MovieClips, for example). Thus, I decided to take this opportunity despite there being quite a few articles that document this. If I haven’t bored your by now, read on!

First, Some History

Assets in Flash are normally quite coupled with the SWF. This is probably a result of the long years of timeline scripting that has been burnt into our memories. In Actionscript 2.0, however, the process of abstracting Assets from Actionscript was slightly alleviated through the copious use of duplicateMovieClip(). I too, used to be an avid user of duplicateMovieClip(), until I made the transition to Actionscript 3.0, But before then, duplicateMovieClip() was my quick and dirty solution to many situations I came across in Flash.

Abstracting Assets from Actionscript in Actionscipt 2.0 was relatively simple. One need only separate his/her assets into separate swf files, and simply loadClip() them into the SWF, and employ the use of duplicateMovieClip(). In Actionscript 3.0, however, this situation has changed as Adobe saw fit to remove (or shall we say, omit) the duplicateMovieClip() method.

Now, Adobe recommends the use of the “new” keyword to instantiate multiple instances of a Class. From the Actionscript 2.0 Migration reference:

In ActionScript 3.0, use the new operator to create a new instance.

This doesn’t really help us abstract our Assets from Actionscript. Most of us who have played around enough in Actionscript 3.0 would know that this requires that the Class be part of the SWF calling it, and in facts forces us to embed our assets within the SWF. Using the Loader class to import external SWFs does not expose any classes that we may use to invoke the “new” operation. At least, not obviously, as we shall see later.

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