I needed to draw a dashed line in AS3. I thought it would be easy, but I thought “hey, that one’s already been covered”, expecting that if I could find some ready-made class or lib that would do the job, I might even get some extra benefits. I went on this great interweb page called Google and I searched for “Dashed Line AS3″.

I was disappointed at all the feeble attempts at doing something so simple, so after a couple of attempts i did it myself. I even threw in the added benefit of making it able to draw itself between two points you supply it. I was expecting something extra so I imagine you did too.

Here ya’ go:

DashedLine.as

PS: Damn, that drop shadow Mac OS X includes in window screenshots is really something.

It sports a small, single window interface with a well for dropping SWF files on and three controls at the bottom. These allow you to choose the frame used for the rendered JPG, the JPG quality and there’s an option to make LazyFallback actually play each frame from the SWF leading up to the frame you specify, in case you have timeline scripts and scripted timing that needs to run.

I’ve also created a “Free Utils” page to hold a page for this app and another one that’s currently in the making. Maybe there will be more of them in time.

As noted, the idea for this app was concieved only hours ago, so it is not very thoroughly tested. In fact I’ve just tested installing it, running it and using it in my own Mac environment, so any comments on mileage variations is apprechiated. This is also the first completed AIR app I’ve written and released, so I’ll be humble if it turns out it has flaws. But nonetheless, writing it was great fun! I got to try native drag and drop, file system access, the FDT AIR packager, certificate generation and minimal comps by Keith Peters, all for the first time.

It’s free so I don’t expect anything from you, but if you like it, it’d be nice to hear it

Just thought i’d share this class I made for doing ClickTag banner ads with AS3. It will get the clickTag url form root.loaderInfo. It will also use window.open for compability reasons with IE7 ans Firefox and it will also do logging so the website that will host it can tell if the clickTag is being read in correctly or not.

Here it is:

ClickTag.as

One week in the wild and three minor updates have passed and it’s time to give AILogger some new functionality and a few tweaks. If you’re tired of downloading new versions, you’ll be glad to know that I intend to to start piling the updates with slightly longer intervals from now on.

This time, we reach version 1.1.0 and here are the changes:

• New optional detailed logging via public var detailedLogging
• Option to turn log coloring off via public var coloring
• More robust handling of different message types
• More robust log coloring

Download version 1.1.0 here.

EDIT: Version 1.0.4 available

[1.0.4 - 5.6.2009]
- Better information output from logged events

[1.0.3 - 4.6.2009]
- Added ability to detect logged events
- Logged ErrorEvents are now displayed with event type

[1.0.2 - 2.6.2009]
- Fixed a bug where severity coloring was not applied to the last characted in a log line

Today I was convinced to share a piece of code that has been with me for many years. AILogger is a sophisticated text field on your stage to write stuff into when trying to debug a Flash application that’s online. It has several features lite automatic date/time stamping, severity coloring, repeat detection, password protection, line appending and keyboard scrolling. You can download and read more about it here.

Although a bit late for this season, I thought I’d share a small christmasy ActionScript nugget with you. This stuff was developed some time ago, so it’ll happily compile to Flash Player 6 if needs be. The script simply replicates a small, white particle that resembles a snow flake and animates it so that it falls from the sky. It also imitates 3D by altering the size and speed of the flakes and you can put any graphic you want inside the snowFlake movie clip to make it behave like a particle of snow.

I’ve actually had much use for it for various clients and projects. Go ahead and download it here:

Snow Flake FLA

Merry Christmas!