Okay, I am not trying to defend Flash in any way, but Html5 development will soon hit the same bottle-necks the Flash player did, as it uses the browser’s Javascript engine.

Evidence: check out the CPU demands in Google’s buckyball page.. looks familiar?

So here it is:

What you need to do in order to use it is add two functions:


import LoadAnim;
...
private var myAnim :LoadAnim;
...

public function hideAnim():void
{
myAnim.stopAnim();
removeChildAt(1);
}

Download the class here, enjoy : )

So I decided to take the challenge and make a code only (no library assets), lightweight video player, with elegant UI that works as you would expect it to, with keyboard control (starting with play/pause, forward/backwards jumps, the fundamentals, the musts). also fullscreen mode and moving between the screen modes by double clicking a la VLC (which is my favorite video player on the Mac), and of-course buffering.

At the moment the features are:
• Keyboard control: play/pause (space bar); jump backwards/forward (left/right);
• Volume control affecting the volume while pressing and moving cursor;
• Fullscreen-normal by double-clicking the video or dedicated button;
• Single click on the video toggles play/pause;
• Display of position and total duration;
• Clickable progress bar, a click will jump video to position.
• Control bar will hide when mouse leaves stage.
• File size is 20.8k (!!)

Credits:
The architecture was inspired by Mr.doob’s player, but I replaced his video controller with the excellent FLVPlayer by Martin Legris, and added my own touch and flavor

Suggestions are more than welcome, tell me what you think!

Update: I was working on improving the player behavior across platforms and browsers, discovering that events behavior is different on IE from the ret of the browsers. Surprising ha? MouseEvent.MOUSE_OUT added to the stage is not firing on IE, you have to add Event.MOUSE_LEAVE, it still works for the rest of the browsers. This actually solved several oddities on IE, people are still using it? really?!

Update 2: I added spinning loading animation when video is buffering, and moved the duration text to be next to the position text, I guess it is easier for the eye this way.

The background is made of two movieClips, each has it’s own behavior, if you click the horn you can adjust its size and direction, if you click the text area you can scale the textField and the balloon background along with it.

This trick can be really handy if you’re making animations of moving silhouettes. In this flash I used GreenSock’s TransformManager to make the textField and horn controlable.

I’ve been playing with the drawing classes, experimenting gradients and blending modes, and so I put together a small (basic) as3 class that generates a glossy button with pure code – no library assets.

You can download the class here.

The class constructor expects only 3 parameters:
@param rad = Width of button
@param darkColor = The color in top area, more dominant
@param lightColor = The color in the bottom area

* you can then place it anywhere, and use method setCaption(cap:String) to place a label on the button, though this is a very basic implementation of text handling, I focused on drawing..

Let me know if you liked it : )

Only specific contents should be scaled when the stage is resized, the same way apps handles resizing: an app will redistribute its panels without scaling them, will scale panel background but not the buttons and the controls in it. When the entire stage is simply scaled, the interface balance is disturbed.. and we don’t want that.

So I decided to share: ResizeManager (download) is a very simple scaling engine, a single AS2 class that can easily be modified or extended for your needs.
The manger can control scaling and some basic align options of MovieClips you register to it, so you can scale a background MovieClip to cover the entire stage, and keep another MovieClip centered without scaling. It also adds default definitions for the Stage behavior (scaleMode: noScale, stageAlign: TL), though you can change those.
In order to use it, simply import the class and create an instance of the ResizeManager:

import com.adifeiwel.custom_ui.ResizeManager;

var rm = new ResizeManager();


Then, use method registerMC() to register each MovieClip you want to control (including MovieClips nested within MovieClips, make sure parent MC is x:0, y:0), the registerMC method expects the following parameters:
_parentName:MovieClip (the name of the MoviClip)
_widthUpdate:Number (scaling in percentage from Stage.width, 0 for no-scale)
_heightUpdate:Number (scaling in percentage from Stage.height, 0 for no-scale)
_centerUpdate:Boolean (align MovieClip to center of stage)
_middleUpdate:Boolean (vertical-align MovieClip to middle of stage)

for example (see it here):

rm.registerMC(portMC.mainBG, 100, 100, false, false);
// will scale to cover all Stage

rm.registerMC(portMC.vClip, 0, 80, false, false);
// will scale to take 80% of Stage.height


enjoy : )

Update: You can download the example FLA here.

After far too much time searching Adobe’s Livedoc (what a shame, didn’t find the answer there), and reading countless posts, I eventually found the answer via Flash Help Panel.

Apparently the only way is to change the default skin of the component, to do that you simply prepare a MovieClip to serve as skin and give it linkage name, then set the component instance style to use the skin you prepared, like this:

aSp.setStyle( "upSkin", newSkinClip );

upSkin is the default skin class, and I’m setting it to use the skin I made.

Adobe really should find a way to make those livedoc easier for use and orientation, it takes too long for pages to load, and I keep finding my self clicking in loops..