Chapter 22. Building a Flash Paint Application

Flash MX offers many possibilities for dynamically generating vector graphics and text using ActionScript. In this chapter, you will create a Flash Paint application. This application builds on many of the recipes from earlier chapters. Specifically, this application utilizes the following skills:

• Drawing and filling shapes with the Drawing API

• Developing and using custom components

• Extending classes

• Swapping depths of movie clips and text fields

• Using mouse and key listeners

• Changing colors of movie clips

• Getting and setting the current focus and selection

The Flash Paint application is designed to allow for the following functionality:

• Drawing lines, rectangles, and ellipses

• Adding text fields

• Rearranging existing shapes and text

• Moving existing shapes and text forward or backward to adjust the overlap with other objects

• Selecting a color to apply to new text and with which to draw shapes

• Filling existing shapes with solid color and applying color to existing text

• Deleting existing shapes and text