When Flash Player 7 was introduced, Macromedia added some very powerful features into their TextField object. Most notably, the ability to display a lot of HTML formatted text, including images. And you can even use Cascading Style Sheets!

Here is another fun bit that I wrote several years ago in Flash 5 and Actionscript 1.0. We've all seen the old Paint By Numbers pictures that we used to get as kids. I decided to try to replicate the idea in Flash.

The thing that makes this more interesting than most of the Paint By Numbers pages on the net is that you can mix your paint colors, creating basically any color that you wish.

This is a fun little "game" that I wrote mostly on an airplane on my way to a Flash Forward convention in San Francisco back in 2001.

There is no goal to this game but it can be fun to play with for a bit. It allows you to grab planets that are in orbit around the sun and throw them into a different orbit. And you can add more planets and watch them collide.

Do you have a Shopping Cart program that uses Flash, and you need to display or print receipts with product Barcodes? One solution would be to have jpg files of all the barcodes and load them into Flash.

However, I will show you how to dynamically generate and display barcodes using Actionscript and a barcode font. This can save you a lot of storage space and bandwidth, and will generate vector barcodes, which will look smoother and print better than a jpg file.

XML may sound scary to people who don't have a computer programming background, but if you're familiar with HTML, you already have a good idea of how XML works.

Both HTML and XML are markup languages. HTML is short for "Hypertext Markup Language", XML is short for "Extensible Markup Language". They both use similar tags to help give more information about the content they surround.

Code and Objects in Actionscript are organized in a hierarchy structure. Things that live on the main timeline are considered to be at the _root.

Movie clips that are loaded into the main timeline have their own timeline and therefore have their own way of referring to their own Objects. From within that MovieClip, the _root layer is considered to be the _parent