IFBIN - Great Software By Example

Owen put together this amazing example for IFBIN Free Friday. It uses author-time blend modes and the mx.transitions.Tween classes to provide random motion similar to a lava lamp with very little ActionScript. Great work Owen!


Download IFBIN Service 1.0.1 for 1-Click Installation and Example Configuration

Lava Lamp Example ZIP

Owen's notes on the example:

"The real 'trick' of this example is using the authoring blending modes in the Flash IDE, instead of using heavy ActionScript, where possible I choose the 'easiest way' possible to achieve the effect, instead of focusing on 'formal correctness'. In my opinion, it shows that you can achieve really cool looking effects without heavy ActionScript, it's just a gradient that blends into the background and 'adds' the colors, thus creating a lava lamp like effect." Owen van Dijk

This example is available with full source and documentation within Flash® by Example.

More to come.

Ted :)

In the 30 days since launch, IFBIN authors added 50 high quality well documented examples into Flash® By Example. Today we reached 150 examples on the service. What an amazing month!

Flash® By Example has really come together as a product and broken new ground as a software subscription. We are seeing ongoing development contribution into IFBIN in so many areas of Flash and Flex. There is allot of fantastic software headed into IFBIN and we cannot wait to show you what we have been working on. When great developers are treated as partners, great things happen.

The next phase of IFBIN is turning towards our customers and focusing on solving the problems that organization and developers face everyday. We are accomplishing this through Directed Development, where you define the problem and IFBIN solves it within reusable, documented, and standardized examples. We launched our customer support email lists today, where customers can get their questions answered from some of the best developers in Flash and Flex. With customer feedback driving our development, we will see some great changes in the usefulness of the subscriptions and the examples within.

Against all this good news is the fact that we have yet to fully support Apple OSX. This is a priority for us and we have encountered delays in delivering a quality product to you. For everyone out there on OSX, we will ship IFBIN Service to you in October.

Early next week we will be posting the application process for becoming an IFBIN author. We are interested in growing our teams while maintaining very high developer quality. We are looking for the best of the best in Flash and Flex, both individual developers and software development firms. If you feel that you or your company would make a valuable addition to IFBIN, I encourage you to apply.

More to come in the next 30 days!

Theodore Patrick
IFBIN Founder & CEO

First I would like to welcome Mario Klingemann to IFBIN as a author/partner. Mario completed this excellent example using the % Modulo operator. The example calculates an animations horizontal position using the modulo operator.



The modulo operator is essential to understand and invaluable in problem solving for animated motion and graphical programming. Mathematically speaking, the modulo operator returns the remainder of a division operation. So for example 22 % 5 will return 2 because if you divide 22 by 5 the 5 will fit 4 times into 22 ( 5 * 4 = 20 ) and leave a rest of 2. This operator provides a handy shortcut where you need to know the remainder. In Mario's example the _x position of the animated red dot is based on the modulo calculation of the range between the two dragable barriers.

The example also provides some trace logic for understanding Modulo in detail. This example is part of the larger basic curriculum at IFBIN. We are providing coverage of every default player method, property, operator, and constant.

This example is available with full source and documentation within Flash® by Example.

More to come.

Ted :)

Starting today IFBIN is taking example requests for Directed Development. In order to meet your development needs within our subscription products Flash® By Example and Flex™ By Example, we are looking for examples that would be meaningful to you.

Directed Development

From the basic to advanced uses of Flash® and Flex™, we have lots of solutions that we have applied throughout our combined consulting experience. We can make your team more effective and solve the difficult problems within your Flash® or Flex™ projects. Simply fill out a Directed Development Request form describing an ideal solution and we will create it and add it into either Flash® By Example or Flex™ By Example.

If your request is urgent, make sure to check "Priority Development" and we will contact you. "Priority Development" is example based consulting where we provide you with an example that solves your request. There is a fee for "Priority Development" but it is much lower than typical consulting, as the result is added into the subscriptions. You save time solving hard problems with great developers and IFBIN shares your solution with the entire subscription. Everybody wins.

I look forward to seeing your Directed Development Requests.

More to come.

Theodore Patrick
IFBIN Networks Founder and CEO

Guy contributed this example using flash.filters.BlurFilter. The example provides a carousel of people where the faster they spin the more blur is applied. It is a nice effect and a great use of the new Filters in Flash® 8.



This example is available with full source and documentation within Flash® by Example.

More to come.

Ted :)

Richard Leggett posted his IFBIN Hello World example. The example uses particle classes to emit a fountain of characters. It also used flash.filters.BlurFilter for effect and cacheAsBitmap to speed things up.



The particle classes Richard included are very useful. They allow you to customize the particles with any movieclip and to customize the particles with many properties including angle, gravity, color and much more.

Hello World examples are free to download, just install the IFBIN Service and with one click, the source is securely installed on your machine.

More to come.

Ted ;)

Every Friday IFBIN will be releasing a high quality example for free download. This week's free download covers the flash.geom.Point.interpolate method and was authored by Keith Peters.



Download IFBIN Service 1.0.1 for 1-Click Installation and Example Configuration

Point.interpolate Example ZIP

In this example Keith uses 2 Point classes to interpolate the position of a 3rd Point. The real jewel within interpolate is the simplicity of calculating relative positions on a connecting line. The following code returns a new Point "pointC" on the line between "pointA" and "pointB" based on a 0-1 value from the V2 NumericStepper component:

var pointC:Point = Point.interpolate( pointA , pointB , stepper.value );

This example fully complies with the IFBIN Development Standards. The example includes ample source comments and is very easy to understand each stage of code execution. Readability, comments, and code formatting are essential when examples are used for learning and reuse. Although all authors code differently all software within IFBIN is formatted identically.

This example is available with full source and documentation within Flash® by Example.

More to come.

Ted :)

This example provides role-based security for Flash® Remoting using ColdFusion®. The example manages roles on the server-side and prevents unauthorized remote method execution. The example ships with full client and server code. Amazing work Darron!



This example is a great template for implementing Flash® Remoting within company projects or consulting work. The example allows you to get remoting working quickly and provides a security implementation that is easy to work with. As with all IFBIN examples, there is ample comments and documentation to allow you to understand what is happening at every stage of code execution. In Darron's consulting work he starts all remoting projects with this example.

Additionally this is a great V2 component example using a class. The external class "ExampleForm" provides all the UI logic, events, and remoting logic that make this application work.

Another interesting thing in this example is Darron's use of constants for event naming. In the "ExampleForm" class you will find this line of code:

private static var CLICK:String = "click";

When I asked Darron about it he noted that using constants you let the compiler find your errors for you. In a way it is choosing the "lesser of 2 errors". You can either hunt through your application to find a mispelled 'click' string, or you can let the compiler find them for you.

Here the misspelling would compile fine, but would result in a runtime error:

login.addEventListener( 'clack' , Delegate.create( this , onLoginClick ) );

Here is how Darron does it:

login.addEventListener( CLICK , Delegate.create( this , onLoginClick ) );

If you mispell CLICK, the compiler will let you know about it!

Considering this example took Darron about 14 hours to create and several projects to refine, you will save lots of time reusing this example. By reusing the examples within Flash® By Example, you will complete projects faster and save development time.

In addition to this example, we have several other remoting examples based on this codebase. Look for these examples shipping soon:

Flash® By Example:
AMFPHP Flash® Remoting Role-Based Security
ASP.NET Flash® Remoting Role-Based Security
JAVA Flash® Remoting Role-Based Security

Flex® By Example:
ColdFusion® Flash® Remoting Role-Based Security
AMFPHP Flash® Remoting Role-Based Security
ASP.NET Flash® Remoting Role-Based Security
JAVA Flash® Remoting Role-Based Security

I must publically thank Darron for providing such an important example of Flash® application development using remoting. I am sure that many great projects will benefit from your effort. Great work Darron!

This example is available with full source and documentation within Flash® by Example.

More to come.

Ted :)

In Flash® 8 you can use filters on almost any displayable surface even dynamic textfields. In this example, Guy Watson provides a blurred scrolling textfield, plus a handy scrollbar component he wrote 2 years ago.


This example used flash.geom.Rectangle and flash.filters.BlurFilter to blur the visible area when the scrollbar is moved. During scroll execution, the BlurFilter is varies the blurY property depending on the distance from scroll completion. As the text nears its destination, the blurY gets less and less until it reached 0 or no blur.

This example is available with full source and documentation within Flash® by Example.

More to come.

Ted :)

Detecting and displaying Flash content seamlessly is an art. In this example I am using FlashObject by Geoff Stearns to display Flash content when the user clicks a link. FlashObject handles Flash Player detection and writes valid XHTML to screen replacing DIV content seamlessly and effortlessly.&

Having worked with many Flash detections systems none comes close to what Geoff Stearns has done with FlashObject. He has made properly embedding Flash content on a web page seamless and XHTML compliant. At IFBIN we are replacing all Satay detection scripts with FlashObject because it just works so well.

Last week we discovered a problem with the IFBIN News blog. Since we post new examples every weekday, on the index and archive pages we are seeing 5-20 Flash assets rendering on a single page. In order to reduce the number of Flash Players displayed we researched a using FlashObject to replace HTML content with an Example SWF when the user clicked. Ideally we would show and Image, then replace it with the real content if the user wanted to view it. Here is what we came up with:



My favorite feature of FlashObject is that you never duplicate Flash settings. Enter them once and you are done! I have made so many mistakes making sure the object settings match the embed settings. The funny thing is that using FlashObject, embedding Flash compatibly is simpler than using object/embed.

I have to thank Geoff Stearns for creating such a great Flash detection system. Take some time to explore FlashObject, once you use it you will never use any other detection system.

We will be providing a series of HTML/JS examples using FlashObject within IFBIN. We also just completed integration of FlashObject on the new IFBIN homepage this morning.

This example is available with full source and documentation within Flash® by Example.

More to come.

Ted Patrick

We have been so busy making examples that we didn't have time to get our site updated until today. If you are curious about what we are up to, take a fresh look at IFBIN.COM.&

IFBIN's business is 110% about documenting change within working software examples. We have partnered with the best team of Flash and Flex developers to create an ever growing library of solutions to help you work and learn. Lets be honest, no single person can know everything about Flash and Flex, so why would you base your knowledge on a single perspective? IFBIN is about learning through working software from best developers in the industry.

"Directed Development"

Tomorrow we will begin taking requests for examples for both Flash and Flex. Our team will be delivering solutions to your requests to the best of our ability. As an IFBIN customer, your example requests receive priority in development and your get source access to all the solutions we develop. "Directed Development" allows IFBIN to support your team by addressing your problems with working solutions.

More to come,

Theodore E Patrick
IFBIN Founder and CEO

Darron Schall completed this new component extending the Macromedia V2 List component. The example adds drag and drop capability to the lists via events.



The dragable list has a 'dragable' and 'dropable' properties. You can fire an event on the list and pass data to be added to the list box. This makes it easy to create a shopping cart or other list based view and populate them with drag and drop actions. If 'dropable' is set, when a drop event occurs and data is passed a record will be inserted into the lists dataProvider. If 'dragable' is enabled, the list can be a source of a dragging operation. In the above example the two lists are both set to 'dragable' = true and 'dropable' = true.

Nice example Darron.

This example is available with full source and documentation within Flash® by Example.

More to come.

Ted :)

This example uses webcam video and renders it to a set of animated isometric tiles. The example uses cacheAsBitmap to boost performance while video input is rendered on the fly onto the tiles. Nice example Guy!



flash.display.BitmapData, Camera.get(), and MovieClip.cacheAsBitmap were used to create this effect. In Flash 8 you can process any surface as BitmapData and render images onto any attachedBitmap surface. Here Guy grabbed the Video input and rendered it to BitmapData. The BitmapData is then rendered onto many objects attached to the same BitmapData via attachBitmap. Anytime the BitmapData object changes, all attached views will update. The amazing part is how efficient this can be at runtime. Given that BitmapData is rendered in player memory, rendering the drawing to a surface is a very light hit to the player. In this case there are 256 separate surfaces referencing the single BitmapData object. What a great example by Guy Watson.

This example is available with full source and documentation within Flash® by Example.

More to come.

Ted :)

Patrick Mineault completed his version of Hello World using Flash® 8. Patrick used the flash.filter.ColorTransform and flash.filter.BlurFilter to create this example. The 'Hello World' letters seem to melt into the background.&



I truly enjoy seeing through another developers perspective. Somehow although we use the same tools, each developer has a completely different way of approaching development in Flash®. This is one of the unique benefits of Flash® By Example as we are providing a range of views vs one isolated perspective.

Although every author in Flash® By Example presents a unique perspective, every example is formatted according to the IFBIN Development Standards. The Development Standards stress readability of code by providing indentation, and spaces throughout. Every example is thus easy to read, explore, and reuse. Authors are also required to supply ample comments to provide context to the code. We are providing a unique resource that allows you to peer over the shoulder of great developers as see how they work and use the medium.

This "Hello World" example is available as a free download within Flash® By Example. Download the IFBIN Service and see a different perspective on Flash®.

This example is available with full source and documentation within Flash® by Example.

More to come.

Ted :)

I have been working with ConvolutionFilter. This example allows you to experiment with a ConvolutionFilter and isolates the behavior of the divisor property. The effects possible with ConvolutionFilter are really impressive.



ConvolutionFilter is difficult to grasp with a single example so I am going to provide several to cover its properties independently. In each I am going to attempt to isolate the effect of changes to a particular property. In this case I isolated the divisor property. 'divisor' determines how even the ConvolutionFilter applies the matrix calculations. If you sum the matrix values, the total will be the divisor value that evenly distributes the color intensity. In this case, I am using a 3x3 matrix with a sum of 9. Initially divisor is set to 8.85 and thus it amplifies the color intensity of the color added to the BitmapData. If you set divisor above 9, everything will slowly fade to the base color depending on the BitmapData. When you have filled the BitmapData with a color, type in another color or set the divisor above 9 to return to Black.

This example is available with full source and documentation within Flash® by Example.

More to come.

Ted :)

Congratulations to 14 Flash® By Example author/partners for receiving official credit within the Macromedia Flash® 8 release. Flash® By Example has partnered with 25 of the best developers for understanding the latest release of Flash®.

Flash® By Example Author/Partners:

Andreas Heim - Seattle, WA, USA
Andre Michelle - Berlin, Germany
Aral Balkan - London, England, UK
Brajeshwar Oinam - Mumbai, India
Branden Hall - Washington, DC, USA
Chafic Kazoun - Washington, DC, USA
Darron Schall - Hershey, PA, USA
Guy Watson - London, England, UK
Jesse Warden - Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Jon Williams - North Carolina, USA
Keith Peters - Somerville, MA, USA
LordAlex Leon - Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Mario Klingemann - Munich, Germany
Matt Voerman - Australia
Matthew David - Wisconsin, USA
Owen van Dijk - Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Peter Joel Hall - London, England
Ralf Bokelberg - Cologne, Germany
Robert M. Hall - Philadelphia, PA, USA
Sam Robbins - Boston, MA, USA
Stefan Richter - Leicester, England
Theodore Patrick - Ankara, Turkey
Tink - London, England, UK
Veronique Brossier - New York, NY, USA
Wes Carr - Providence, RI, USA

Flash® By Example was created to provide your development team access to great developers through high quality, well documented example software. It is a rare opportunity to work with any one of the above developers and to understand Flash® from their prospective is invaluable.

License Flash® By Example today to understand the professional perspective on Macromedia Flash® 8.

Much more to come.

Theodore Patrick
IFBIN Networks - Founder / CEO

This example uses flash.filters.DropShadowFilter to decorate the IFBIN logo. The example exposes all of the properties of the DropShadowFilter class using V2 components. This is one of the Filter Explorers included with Flash® By Example.



Understanding the properties of the filter classes is essential in creating dynamic effects. Although these can be set as properties within the Flash® IDE, using them with ActionScript exposes the full potential of filters at runtime. Although this is a good example of filters, it is also worth a look from a components perspective. The DropShadowFilter is only updated when valid events are broadcast allowing player performance to remain very high.

This example is available with full source and documentation within Flash® by Example.

More to come.

Ted :)

This example uses flash.filters.ColorMatrixFilter to modify the colors of the IFBIN Logo and an image. The example allows you to explore the effects of modifying a 4x5 Matrix using V2 Components. This is one of the Filter Explorers included with Flash® By Example.



The ColorMatrixFilter is particularly interesting as it provides color manipulation through a very simple Matrix. In the example, the NumericStepper value correlates to the 4x5 matrix that the ColorMatrixFilter supports. It is easy to see how powerful this filter can be when applied to just about any MovieClip. Tinic Uro posted a great example using the ColorMatrixFilter for high contrast Accessibility, it is a great read. Cheers Tinic!

This example is available with full source and documentation within Flash® by Example.

More to come.

Ted :)

Robert M. Hall completed this amazing example. It provides WebCam to JPEG conversion using a PHP application using the new flash.display.BitmapData class. Simply take a picture using an attached webcam and you will receive a JPEG as output.



Robert used flash.Display.BitmapData and getPixel to read image data and post it to a PHP application for JPEG processing. Roberts example is very useful for Kiosk installations where you might want to send postcard images or provide printed output to a end user.

Flash® By Example ships with more than client-side software. In this example, Robert provides a PHP application to add JPEG output from client side Flash®. We will be providing other server-side software in Flash® By Example because data integration is critically important in building Rich Internet Applications.

If you are interested in exploring Macromedia® Flash® from a different perspective, we invite you to license Flash® By Example. Robert M. Hall is one of 24 amazing authors contributing to our ever growing library of examples. Great example Robert!

More to come,

Ted :)

I made this Pixel Editor using the new flash.display.BitmapData class. The PixelEdit project will be released over time as I add features and each version will remain available in Flash® By Example. Ideally you will see the project evolve over time as I solve problems, recompile, and refactor.



The new flash.display.BitmapData class represents an Image in player memory. To display an instance of this class, you use MovieClip.attachBitmap to make the instance appear on the stage. In PixelEdit I have used attachBitmap twice to provide the editing view and the preview view. As both reference the same BitmapData instance, as I make changes to the BitmapData, the view is updated on both automatically. You can actually have N views of a BitmapData active on stage at one time. Depending on the editors state (Pen or Eraser) drawing on the editing view will have different effects. Currently the states are hardwired into the editing view but we will make these class based in a later build. The editing of the BitmapData is done using the new setPixel method in conjunction with coordinates and a color. 'setPixel' is very fast and allows you to rapidly modify BitmapData. As you can see from the example there is no delay in the drawing tools.

The goal for this version was not to make the best pixel editor but to get simple version working. The code was not designed very well as I was focused on getting to basic functionality. Working this way, I learned some lessons about using the new classes and discovered some core problems with events. I will take these lessons into the next version and apply a pattern that will make development much easier. Ideally these changes will give me the headroom needed to add higher level editing tools while simplifying the design.

I adhere to the "Throw one Away" mentality during early developing as I never get things correct on the first try, who does? With every project I work on I plan to throw a release away and learn from it. At this early stage it is a waste of time and energy for me to invest heavily in design and OOP. I planned to learn some lessons and get to a working application as quickly as possible. This stage took me about 2.5 hours and included writing a ColorPicker component. I probably shouldn't have written the component but I knew I would need it downstream. This is not to say that design and OOP are not important but to actually design something you need to understand the problem at hand. As things evolve I will use classes to refactor and rebuild the editor into a more reusable format.

If you have any feature suggestions for PixelEdit, please post them into the comments below. Happy pixel editing!

This example is available with full source and documentation within Flash® by Example.

More to come.

Ted :)

There are many ways to learn about the new flash.geom.Point class in Flash® 8 although understanding it from Keith Peters' perspective is a rare opportunity. In today's example Keith provides a vector drawing example using flash.geom.Point. Amazing!


Use your mouse to draw above.
Directly from the example comments:
"flash.geom.Point is a new class in Flash® 8 that simplifies working with two-dimensional locations. A point has two properties: x and y. It also has many useful methods for manipulating single or multiple points. This example shows you how to create a point, see what it contains, and contains a simple drawing program using Points created with the mouse's location."

The key to this example is that Keith is storing a set of flash.geom.Point instances within an Array and allowing the Drawing API to render the accumulated strokes to screen. Keith has started development on the methods within flash.geom.Point and the flash.geom.Rectangle classes. I am looking forward to exploring Keith's examples for these methods. Great work Keith!

If you are interested in exploring Macromedia® Flash® from a different perspective, we invite you to license Flash® By Example. Keith Peters is one of 22 amazing authors contributing to our ever growing library of examples.

More to come,

Ted :)

This example uses flash.filters.BevelFilter to decorate the IFBIN logo. The example exposes all of the properties of the BevelFilter class using V2 components. This is one of the Filter Explorers included with Flash® By Example.



Understanding the properties of the filter classes is essential in creating dynamic effects. Although these can be set as properties within the Flash® IDE, using them with ActionScript exposes the full potential of filters at runtime. Although this is a good example of filters, it is also worth a look from a components perspective. The BevelFilter is only updated when valid events are broadcast allowing player performance to remain very high.

This example is available with full source and documentation within Flash® by Example.

More to come.

Ted :)

Darron Schall created this example using the new flash.display.BitmapData class. It provides a airbrush drawing tools with options using V2 components.&



In Flash® 8, you can create BitmapData objects in memory and use attachBitmap to provide a views of the BitmapData at runtime. The BitmapData class allows you many options in terms of rendering to screen. In this case, as you draw you manipulate the stored BitmapData data and the attached view displays your changes.

The capability added with flash.display.BitmapData and attachBitmap is amazing. It is the basis for many of the more complex imaging examples. This example is available with full source and documentation within Flash® by Example.

More to come.

Ted :)

This example uses flash.filters.BlurFilter to decorate the IFBIN logo. The example exposes all of the properties of the BlurFilter class using V2 components. This is one of the Filter Explorers included with Flash® By Example.



Understanding the properties of the filter classes is essential in creating dynamic effects. Although these can be set as properties within the Flash® IDE, using them with ActionScript exposes the full potential of filters at runtime. Although this is a good example of filters, it is also worth a look from a components perspective. The BlurFilter is only updated when valid events are broadcast allowing player performance to remain very high. Guy Watson, pointed out to me that cacheAsBitmap property is automatically set to true when a filter is applied. After the filter has rendered, the player does not continue to do additional work unless the filter array is set again.

This example is available with full source and documentation within Flash® by Example.

More to come.

Ted :)

This example uses flash.filters.GlowFilter to decorate the IFBIN logo. The example exposes all of the properties of the GlowFilter class using V2 components. This is one of the Filter Explorers included with Flash® By Example.



Understanding the properties of the filter classes is essential in creating dynamic effects. Although these can be set as properties within the Flash® IDE, using them with ActionScript exposes the full potential of filters at runtime. Although this is a good example of filters, it is also worth a look from a components perspective. The GlowFilter is only updated when valid events are broadcast allowing player performance to remain very high.

This example is available with full source and documentation within Flash® by Example.

More to come.

Ted :)