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MovieClip Exploder class

January 18th, 2012 | No Comments | Posted in Adobe Air, adobe flash, flash

I built a logo particle explosion class for a client. Unfortunately they decided not to take this route. It came out rather cool so I thought I’d share this with all of you. You can download the source code and use it anywhere you like. It would be cool if you would tell me where you used it tho.

Download MovieClipExploder source code

Usage:

1. Download the zip file
2. Copy the ‘com’ folder in there to your project directory
3. Make a ‘particle’ sprite/MovieCilp in your .fla file and  choose ‘Export for Actionscript’ when you make it as a MovieClip. Type: ‘particle’ in the ‘Class’ field. (you can use custom shapes if you want to).

Settings for Particle movie clip in flash

3. Particle creation Settings

4. Make the shape inside the particle movie clip as another movie clip and call it “gr”. No actionscript export necessary here. But you can now add effects to this asset. I added a little blur in the example.
5. Make sure your logo has an instance name and it’s on the stage. Then add the code:

import com.teemusk.ExplodeMovieClip;
var logoexploder:ExplodeMovieClip = new ExplodeMovieClip(logo);
addChild(logoexploder);
logoexploder.startEmitter();

6. Publish your movie and watch those particles fly.

That’s it. Enjoy!

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Writing to applicationDirectory with Adobe Air

October 27th, 2011 | 2 Comments | Posted in Adobe Air, flash

I had a lot of painful trouble with flash.filesystem.File functionality the other day. The problem is that File.applicationDirectory is read-only. I understand that it’s read only as on a mac we’re inside the <myair>.app/Contents… folder when we’re executing scripts and it is not very wise to write stuff in there.

Most of the times the File.desktopDirectory or File.documentsDirectory will meet our needs just fine and we can write stuff there. That was not the case for me. I needed an air desktop app which would work like a website or projector with loading data next to itself (from ‘images’ or ‘data’ folder etc.). Also I really needed to write a log out of the app so I can see how people are using it and if it’s app’s problem when it crashed.

Long story short. Here is my solution which is a bit of a hack but not too bad and at least it works ‘unlocking’ the File.applicationDirectory so we can have read/write access to it.

The trick is to resolve path for the applicationDirectory first and according to it’s native path we resolve the folder as File.userDirectory. My code goes like this:


var appPath:File = File.applicationDirectory.resolvePath("");
var fromUserPath:File = File.userDirectory.resolvePath(appPath.nativePath);

fromUserPath will take us to the exact same place as appPath, but with a difference that it is read/write and also you can do fromUserPath.parent.parent.parent to it to get to the folder next to the air app on a mac.

So my code that handles the starting path for my app on win and mac (and debug mode) goes as follows:

if (Capabilities.os.toLowerCase().indexOf("win") > -1){
localPath = File.applicationDirectory.resolvePath("");
}else if (Capabilities.os.toLowerCase().indexOf("mac") > -1){
var appPath:File = File.applicationDirectory.resolvePath("");
var fromUser:File = File.userDirectory.resolvePath(appPath.nativePath);
localPath = fromUser.parent.parent.parent;
}
if(Capabilities.playerType == "Desktop" && Capabilities.isDebugger){
localPath = File.applicationDirectory.resolvePath("");
}

//if you trace localPath.nativePath now you can see that you’re on a directory that your air app is at.

I had a terrible headache with this and could not find a straight answer by googling so I thought I’d give something back to community. Enjoy.

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