Make a Dynamic Copyright Notice in Flash: Part 1 – Basix

This huge tutorial will help you learn a number of useful programming techniques, all tied together with a deceptively simple (and very flexible) end result. Grab a cup of coffee and let’s jump into part one..


From the first look at the demo, I’m sure you will think, what’s the big deal? This can be done with a single timeline tween and a stop() action in the last frame. But in this case, appearances are deceiving. The actual purpose of this tutorial is not to teach you how to make a primitive copyright notice, but to show you a great cluster of useful programming techniques, the copyright notice serving as a simple example.

Of course one may argue that using complex object-oriented programming for such a basic task is like firing a ballistic missile to swat a fly. But then again, if someone would actually manage to hit a fly deliberately with a ballistic missile, that would say a lot about that person’s marksmanship, wouldn’t it? Anyway, in a moment you’ll see that our little module packs a lot more value than is at first obvious.

From this tutorial you will learn a number of useful techniques:

  • Creating timer-based animations
  • Transforming a String received from XML into a MovieClip instance name
  • Correctly interpreting XML String values as Booleans
  • Basic error handling when passing values from XML
  • Drawing shapes with code
  • Creating masks with code
  • Adding and removing event handlers
  • Creating the resizing events
  • Adding text fields in code
  • Text formatting
  • Working with Date class

In the meantime, you can download all the files used in this tutorial from the link above.


Step 1: Create a .fla File

Let’s start by creating a new .fla file.

In that file, let’s change the stage width to 600 and

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