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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This tutorial is part 2 of a series of posts on creating a music player. Click the links below to view the other posts in the series:

• Part 1 - Using Sound in ActionScript 3
• Part 3 - Creating a Pause Button
• Part 4 - Creating a Mute Toggle Button

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In our last tutorial, we talked about how to create a simple music player using ActionScript 3 with a play button and a stop button.In this tutorial, we'll take our music player one step further as we discuss how to add a volume slider to our Flash file.If you want to follow along, download the source file from the previous tutorial. This is the file we'll be starting with.

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This tutorial is Part 1 of a series of tutorials on creating a music player. Click the links below to view the other posts in the series:

• Part 2 - Creating a Volume Slider
• Part 3 - Creating a Pause Button
• Part 4 - Creating a Mute Toggle Button

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Lately it seems that everyone has become somewhat of a music snob. Everyone is convinced that his or her taste in music is perfectly objective and that anyone who doesn't like his or her favorite band is intellectually inferior. For instance, if you were to tell me that you didn't adore The Shins, Led Zeppelin, and/or Billy Joel, I would probably write your mother a letter, verbally assaulting her for drinking so much vodka while she was pregnant.

Anyways, in an era where melodic snobbishness is so prevalent, everyone with a website (or a MySpace account) wants to play their favorites for the whole world to hear, so if you're a Flash designer/developer, it might do you some good to learn how to import, play, and modify sound in ActionScript.In this tutorial, I'm going to introduce you to using sound in ActionScript 3, and in later posts, we'll start to get a little more in depth with the different things we can do with sound.

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I recently had a request for a tutorial on how to apply masks using ActionScript 3.0. If you've ever tried doing this with AS 3, then you've probably discovered that it doesn't work the same as it did in AS 2.

So, for those of you who have never used masks, or for those who have never used ActionScript to create masks, let's start with the basics.

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In the last particle effect tutorial, I laid the groundwork for creating a randomized particle system. In this tutorial, we're going to build on what we've already created, so if you haven't read the last tutorial, you might not get too much out of this one.

Since we're all experts now on creating a basic particle system, this tutorial won't be as lengthy as the last one. In fact, in order to achieve our goals for this tutorial, we'll only have to add a couple simple lines of code.

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In the last post, we discussed the basics of how particle effects work. To sum it all up, a particle effect basically involves creating a single movie clip and then using ActionScript to duplicate it, randomize it, and animate it on the stage.

Now that we understand the basics of particle effects, let's actually put these ideas to use in Flash CS3.

In this tutorial, we'll be creating an effect with random particles flying out from the center of the stage in random directions, with random sizes and opacities.

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In the world of Flash design and development, there is very little that gives me as much giddy pleasure as playing around with particle effects. Over the next few blog posts, I plan to do a few tutorials relating to particle effects, but before I did so, I wanted to lay a little bit of a foundation and talk about the basic idea behind these effects.

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Want to cut your Flash development time in half?

If you answered yes, then you've come to the wrong place. On the other hand, if you'd like to moderately improve your efficiency and save yourself a little time, then it would be well worth your time to learn a few keyboard shortcuts that will save you many a mouse click. Below is a list of some of the keyboard shortcuts that I use most often. It may be helpful to print these out and thumbtack them to your wall.

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