Another drop[down] in the bucket.

Flash beginners often struggle with big goals coupled with a deficit in applied knowledge. Excited about what they know is possible, they make admirable attempts to employ tools in their applications that require more than a freshman's knowhow. One example, is the drop down menu.

Generally, the first attempts involve some of the most convoluted timeline-based design that you can possibly imagine. Infinite movie clip symbols designed to cover every sliding menu possibility. I too once made attempts using this approach. I know how hard and time consuming a process it is to use such a cumbersome tool, so unsuited to the task and end up with an unsatisfactory and inflexible result.

I have created a little drop down menu component that I am going to share. It is written in AS3 and is meant for Flash authoring tool users. Here is a glitchy preview. Code and more examples will follow soon.

Drop down menu experiment sample

Canada Day Nodes

Canada Day passes uneventfully as I lay sick in bed. I play with a little Flash experiment that I had been toying with days before.

It is sort of old school as Flash experiments go. Some nodes, represented as circles, jiggling around the screen. Some lines connecting the nodes. The brighter the connecting line, the closer the nodes.

Jiggling Node Experiment

One thing I discover is that I still don't have a simple way of converting a number to a hex value. I still convert my RGB values to hex Strings and then use parseInt to bring them back to the world of numbers. More will follow...