This was one of my first sites after getting out of school (many many years ago, because i’m old now ), and it was such a huge learning experience. I learned so much about flash, typography, and color theory with this project and put countless hours into this. It was an honor to do something for Alicia Key’s non profit, and an even bigger honor to be a web finalist at Austin’s SXSW.

Shout out to all the guys at Hardball Creative who took me in and let me run on this one.

Olliekoalas.com was a really fun and intense project. It was more of a promotional site then, as nobody KNEW what Ollie Koalas was in Jacksonville, and it had to be extremely enticing to kids.

This site was almost completely in flash, but still extremely lightweight and fast loading. Everything that could have been redrawn as a vector, was redrawn as a vector, art assets and fonts were shared so they only had to be loaded one, photographic images were all being pre-loaded during the appropriate lulls….a LOT went into this site.

However, if I was to do this site today, I would definitely make it more of a hybrid site. The SEO wasn’t great for Olliekoalas.com, and the updates were a beast. Flash deeplinking would be great, not just to re-enable the back and forward buttons on the browser, but also to create landing pages. An XML driven nav, and all XML driven content would also have helped in upkeep.

Overall, I’m still really happy with the site. It accomplished the goal of creating an experience that kids welcomed (and offered financial incentives for those kids to push their parents to go to Ollie Koalas), and completely killed anything Chuck E. Cheese had up at the time.

This really make me want to redo my current site into something more animation friendly…hhhhmmmmmm…

Flash AS3 Contact Form and Text Event Listeners

For those of you new to Flash who just want to knock out an AS3 contact form…here you go!

Once you download the file, you’ll notice you can use either 1) normal text fields or 2) UI components from the components panel.

There’s also ton of additional methods, properties, and event handlers commented within the file.

Lastly the code you’ll need for the php file, is commented within the file itself. Use that code to create a file called “mail.php” and 1) remember to enter in the email address you want the form to go to and 2)  remember where you upload it!

If you have any questions, hit me up in the comments below. Otherwise, download and enjoy!

http://bit.ly/flash-as3-contact-form

You want to make a button in flash using AS3? It’s easy!

1)MAKE SURE you’re movie clip has an instance name!

Also, please please please make sure you’re dealing with an actual “movie clip” and not a “button”.

The next step is to go to the Actionscript layer (you should have a layer label “actionscipt”, “as”, or something of that nature to hold all of your actionscript) and insert the following code:

instanceNameOfMovie_mc.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, nameOfFunction);

function nameOfFunction onClick(event:MouseEvent):void

{

trace(“You just made an event handler to handle mouse click events!”);

}

And you’re done! You’ve made a movieclip that acts like a button with event handlers!

Now, some of you may ask, “Why not just use a button?”. The reason, the gives you more flexibility, and this is your first step in learning how to control event handlers. There may be times when using a button may be more appropriate, but for now, this is the way to go.

You can see a list of what other “Events” can be paired with the “MouseEvent” listener here. Experiment!