Improving Flash’s Interactive Timeline Animations

Something that has become (somewhat) of a lost art these days is the animated button. Designers used to go crazy with engrossing roll overs and roll outs – sometimes to the detriment of usability. Now-a-days, I don’t see many interesting buttons.

Perhaps it’s due to how button animations can be  decently executed with Javascript and CSS;  people are getting used to those and many designers are simplifying Flash buttons to mimic Javascript and CSS buttons. Another theory might be do to how more of Flash work has shifted towards developers handling  animations.  They prefer to just code the animation and in doing so can do some great things, but some things still can only done by a hand made animation.

Then….there is another theory of mine; a more subtle detail that everyone thinks, but doesn’t say out loud…

Hand animated buttons are jumpy!

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My Latest Implementaion of Skipping AS3 Events

In a previous post, I talked about how I use method closures to avoid AS3 events. Since then I have been using the technique extensively and I still don’t use custom events – at all. The previous example was OK, but this one is better. This is also a class I use in most my projects.

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Data Structures with AS3 – The Linked List

When programming, there are many things I avoid or  just squash out altogether:

• If I see someone has written an event, I try to get rid of it – this goes 2x for custom events.
• If I’m working on someone’s production code and I see comments, I refactor and delete them.
• I rarely use conditionals.

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