Experimental Interfaces

Abstract

The movie clip object is at the core of Flash. ActionScript control of the movie clip has always been at the center of any great Flash work with its numerous methods and properties. Now in Flash MX it has been given a fabulous new set of methods, properties, and most importantly, event handlers to give us much greater control, more precision and greater versatility in the scripting environment. Exciting new features in MX include the ability to create new movie clips on the fly at runtime. The new drawing API allows us to dynamically populate such movie clips with lines, curves, fills and gradients on the fly as the movie is playing. A particularly brilliant new addition to the ActionScript lexicon is the ability to ascribe events to movie clips much in the same way you would give buttons event handlers. What’s more, the old methodology of attaching code to movie clips and buttons has given way to a much more structured and centralized method akin to real OOP languages. It’s now possible for all of your code to reside in one place. Other exciting advances include the ability to dynamically load external media such as JPGs and MP3s, I could go on but I would like to give each of these more time and look at them in more detail as I work through a set of creative experimental interfaces with variations utilizing many of these new features and more.