Flash for Web Design Gallery Done

I finished the basic flash gallery with scrolling menu.  I had to play some trickery to prevent the user from being able to access the menu until the swfs are loaded.  I tried to externally load all of the swfs, only to discover that it would be a pain to access the buttons within the menu swf.   So I took the cheese-mo approach and “hide” the menu using the alpha filter until the screen shots are loaded.  Heheh … boneheaded, but effective.  I haven’t made a load screen yet, so bear with it as it loads.  Here’s a link to the swf.

Link

I learned a lot about the limitations of ActionScript doing this little project.  The main limitation is that there is no “evaluate” function in ActionScript 3.0.  I guess this has to do with ActionScript compiling to something like an executable.  It just can’t make stuff and run it at runtime.  Therefore, I couldn’t use loops and arrays to automate the creation of the buttons and event handlers.  I’ve decided to make a basic JavaScript version of this for greater flexibility.  To be honest ~6 is my threshold before I want to automate the process.  It’s also a pain in the butt trying to access elements from swf to swf.  Anyhow, I’m glad I did this, so now in the future I just have plug images and swfs into it and I can change the appearence of the gallery within the Flash IDE.