Custom Flash Player Menus

7th December, 2008

I’ve posted a little tutorial here on making custom Flash context (right click) menus because when I learnt to do it (a long while back now though) there was very little out there describing how.

• First of all you need a function to take the menu action. It can do absolutely nothing, but it does need to exist for the menu item to work. For the example here though it will link to a website:
  function menuClick() {
getURL("http://www.srjm.co.uk", _blank);
}
• Next, declare the menu variable, it’s good practice (and incredibly helpful) to do it this way because then whenever you add to the menu you get the Code Hints.
  var menu:ContextMenu = new ContextMenu();
• Finally, hide the existing menu (unless you wish to keep the play/rewind and other options) and add your own options instead, and apply it to the root context menu:
  menu.hideBuiltInItems();
var menuItem1:ContextMenuItem = new ContextMenuItem("http://www.srjm.co.uk/", menuClick);
var menuItem2:ContextMenuItem = new ContextMenuItem("SRJM Design", menuClick, true, false);
menu.customItems.push(menuItem1);
menu.customItems.push(menuItem2);
_root.menu = menu;
  The second ContextMenuItem has additional parameters to give it a horizontal line above and also make it unclickable.

Christmas Vector Art

4th December, 2008

Spent a little time playing with christmas themed vector graphics in between more serious work:

Programs That Can Destroy You

24th September, 2008

I looked away from a page for a few seconds and when I looked back this was the rather disturbing message on my screen. As adverts go, it certainly got my attention.

It was only after it had looped once that I saw that this might be being directed at viruses.

Moved Office

8th August, 2008

We spent the start of this week transferring our furniture across the corridor to a new, more studio-like unit.

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Holiday in Cornwall

14th July, 2008

So I’ve had a holiday in a caravan with my family in rainy Cornwall during the week that had possibly the worst forecast for July ever. So bad in fact that our local presenter David Braine was demonstrating rainfall as dyed blue water in glasses, comparing the monthly average, which wasn’t very much, against a full glass symbolising what was expected to fall in just one day.

However it turned out nowhere near as bad as this and from the sounds it was further up nearer home that got all this rain. So we managed to visit some very beautiful places of which I have taken and uploaded photos to Flickr. I also managed to take a couple of quite successful panoramic photoshop-merged shots.

Harbour

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The Gnome Quest

28th May, 2008

When I first acquired Half Life 2, Episode 2 I just had to see how many of the quests I could complete once I had got past the act of playing the storyline properly once through. And of course I attempted to complete the particularly aggravating Little Rocket Man quest, which essentially sees you carry an ornamental gnome (found hidden in a radio station at the very beginning) throughout the entire game all while doing the challenges you face normally.

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African Sundew Plants

18th May, 2008

I have experimentally planted some of my African Cape Sundew’s offspring (drosera capensis) down by our garden pond where they seem to have settled in quite nicely with the thousands of flies that hover about around there. I found a broken pot in which to plant them, that I partially buried on its side so that a bit of water would be pooled in it, but also begin draining off if the level gets too high.

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Personal Site Update

12th May, 2008

I have decided to start redeveloping my own website’s design again, this time finishing the things I wanted from it in the beginning but couldn’t quite achieve the first time around, from the design through to the administration.

While visually the difference will be pretty unnoticeable (still black, dark purple, light green and golden-white), underneath there is all change again as I shift everything from separate templated pages to an entirely WordPress-driven site, hopefully allowing me to quickly and easily update things when time becomes a much more valuable commodity in the final year. Of course, this has required some serious customisation but should hopefully make the site much more robust.

And then finally I might get around to producing some nice flash content to fill in that dynamic header section at the top of the pages!