Posted on by JesterXL

Captivate: Creating a Flash MX 2004 Component – A Walkthrough

Creating a Flash MX 2004 Component – A Walkthrough

This is a presentation I created in Macromedia Captivate. It will teach an intermediate Flash Developer familiar with coding how to create a Flash MX 2004 Component. I walk through the steps of creating a Login component that uses the component architecture from scratch.

I completed this Wednesday night after doing a second take Monday and Tuesday since my first attempt at one big Captivate file failed. I didn’t have time for additional edits and SWF construction till last night and tonight I spent 3 hours battling the MenuBar and trying to preload it. It seems that if you test streaming during a test movie in Flash, some of your traces aren’t called on static methods… just a guess at whats going on. I ravaged my local copies of MenuDataProvider/TreeDataProvider trying to find why their Initialize methods were getting called, but the traces I put in them didn’t work. I removed the copies from FirstRun and my Local Settings, and utilized the real component from Standard Components.fla vs. using the SWC… still no love. It works outside of Flash, though! …wtf…

Thanks Josh Dura, Greg Burch, Erik Bianchi, and anyone else that listened to my panicked cries about the above.

It was a fun first project, and although capturing the content was a snap, it took signifcant time during my off hours of the week to edit it to fruition. Although I now have a nice Flash framework to play movies in (I didn’t like Captivate’s MenuBuilder), I can see why RoboDemo buffs have jobs; what a lot of work! It just attests to the power of the tools; if we didn’t have these kinds of tools, I can’t even imagine how eLearning would even exist. Even so, Captivate has a ton of improvements to be made that I wrote down, which 20% can be waxed merely because I don’t know enough about it yet. It was fun! Thanks Macromedia for lowering the barrier of entry into this field via Captivate.

Tutorial Source Files – ZIP

14 Replies to “Captivate: Creating a Flash MX 2004 Component – A Walkthrough”

  1. You have a sexy voice man lol :)

    nah, this has been a gripe of mine with Macromedia as of late. There is so many Advanced things to learn with the product range and sometimes TEXT based communication isn’t enough. Enter Captivate…

    Devnet needs to start utilising this product like you have just outlined, in order to skool up some n00bies on concepts that aren’t easy to follow in text / code tutorials.

    Its how I personally learned 3DSMAX was through video tutorials, now i made an uber movie out of it.. you may have seen it…its based a novel by a british author…Lord of the Rings.. its quite popular domestically..

    heh

    But you get my meaning.

    Still very cool preso man, you seem to know a thing or two about flash eh? :)

  2. Holy crap Jesse, nice work! I would suggest for reduced loading times that you bring down the quality of the slides from the default of high to “normal” if you haven’t already. It seems like a long loading time to get the introduction to come up and it was only a minute or so long. Please ignore me if you’ve already done that..

  3. I didn’t know that you could adjust slide quality individually, thanks!

    :: goes to check ::

    Naw, they are all standard. If I change to JPEG, it increase filesize and looks horrible at 80% JPEG. Must be my mouth that adds so much to filesize.

  4. I can see the never-ending chain. First, “How to Create ‘Captivate: Making a Flash MX 2004 Component Walkthrough'” Then, “How to Create ‘How to Create ‘Captivate: Making a Flash MX 2004 Component Walkthrough'”

    And on and on. Get started!

    How big was the final product?
    Did you ever do that arm swing throwdown thing that you do?

    Brent

  5. Looks good man, it didnt autoplay though, and I thought it was loading :) I waited for about 5 minutes before I realized I could just click the menu to get to the Intro.

  9. Absolutely wicked m8.

    Thanks for spending so much time on something aimed at helping struggling newbies like myself to learn this stuff the best way poss’.

    The loading times were quite long, but what’s the hurry? The FREE content is surely worth the wait? ;)

    Keep up the good work m8.

    Alista – Edinburgh

  10. Dude.

    There can be no doubt. You are to Flash Tutorials as Emeril is to TV cooking shows. Bam! Bam! Bam! Keep on kicking it up a notch.

    Laters Yo.

  13. VERY awesome tutorial… I had been using a crappy little homemade login movieclip that didn’t have the look and feel of all the Flash alert/window/button components. I tried combining my login movieclip with the Window component but ran up against a brick wall. After DAYS of googling I couldn’t find any good solutions… until I found your tutorial! Sweet. Thanks for posting!

    Quick question:

    How do you build in a keylistener to detect if the user presses the ‘enter’ or ‘escape’ keys? Users may find it annoying if they can’t use basic keyboard commands when entering in info…

    Thanks again
    – philip

  14. Glad she helped!

    For enter, do:

    yourPassWord_textInput.addEventListener(‘enter’, this);

    function enter()
    {
    doLogin();
    }

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