There is very little that will push users away quicker than a bulky Flash website with no preloader. Without a preloader, your users will have nothing to look at but a blank screen until your Flash file has fully loaded. For users with a speedy broadband connection, this may not be much of an issue (depending on the size of your file), but for people with sluggish connections, it's imperative that you give them some kind of indication that everything is loading properly.

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Today's tutorial is Part 4 of a series of tutorials on creating a music player using Flash CS3 and ActionScript 3. The previous tutorials can be found here:

• Using Sound in ActionScript 3.0
• Creating a Volume Slider
• Creating a Pause Button

If you haven't read these tutorials yet, then I strongly urge you to check them out. The Flash file we'll be starting with can be found at the bottom of the Pause Button tutorial.

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For those of you who are new to ActionScript 3, you might be wondering what happened to the getURL() function. It used to be so easy to create outbound links in Flash with just a single line of code inside the onRelease event for your buttons. Which brings up another question...what happened to the onRelease event?

If you wanted to create a link to another website in ActionScript 2, here's what it would have looked like:

Ah, if only it were still so simple!

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Today's tutorial comes with a bit of good news. Yesterday, my pregnant wife and I went to the doctor and discovered that our first baby is a girl! So naturally, I thought I might post a tutorial on how to create a countdown timer with Flash CS3 and ActionScript 3. Since my wife's due date is August 30th, I'll use that as our countdown date.

This tutorial will cover the basics of using the Date() class and the Timer() class in ActionScript 3. The Timer class, as you may know, is new to AS3. The ActionScript 2 equivalent of a Timer object would be the setInterval method, which is no longer available to us in AS3. So, with no further ado, let's get started.

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This tutorial will be building on two previous tutorials:

• Using Sound in ActionScript 3.0
• Creating a Volume Slider

In this tutorial, we'll look at how to add a pause button to our music player. If you haven't yet worked through the first two tutorials, or if you haven't downloaded the source file from the volume slider tutorial, then you can download it here. This is the file we'll be starting with. In this file, we've already created the basic functionality to play and stop a sound and to control the volume with a draggable slider.

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