Rapid Application Development
Flash is great at application interaction, but falls short of producing an “real” application. For that, you can grab a few R.A.D apps to get you the rest of the way.

• ZINCâ„¢ V2.5
• mProjector
• Apollo

Recently for a project I purchased ZINC but needed to access it’s properties from an AS 2.0 perspective within the hour. So instead of looking around I decided to roll my own. It’s still a draft version written at midnight for an autorun CD. Most of the methods are either test functions or used only to run a file from an xml driven menu.

DRAFT VERSION: com.jgraup.rad.MDM.as

The MDM class is based on the Singleton method in case I need to track status across several classes.

A couple of things I noticed when making this quick menu.

• Animations with dynamic transparency masking chug. Probably because windows is having to re-render a transparent mask every frame that changes shape.
• Trying to exit/quit with a custom skin is a pain. Go no-skin or normal for your window interface - otherwise the damn thing won’t close.
• MovieClip hit zones are a joke. If a MovieClip’s _alpha is 0, chances are ZINC won’t pick up your mouse because it’s being transparently masked. Instead you get a onRollOut. I eventually had to implement a delay on my onHoverLoss in order to get a smoother eventBubbling system.

I’ll post some more examples and setbacks as I remember them.