Fish Eye Menu in ActionScript 2.0

A little while ago we had to do a Fish Eye menu - the magnification effect you see on the Mac OSX dock menu - but we had to do it in ActionScript 2.0, rather than ActionScript 3.0.

Now, Shine Draw have been kind enough to put a version of this out into the wild, but it’s in AS3 [link]. Of course AS3 is faster and nicer, but there are still some out there who want their stuff targetted for Flash Player 8 - which means AS1 or AS2 only - so I backwards converted Shine Draw’s lovely class-based demo to a timeline-scripted AS2 version.

Demo

[kml_flashembed movie=“http://www.psyked.co.uk/downloads/fisheyemenu\_as2.swf” height=“280” width=“500” /]

Download: Fish Eye Menu [Flash CS3, Flash Player 8, AS3, 110KB]

The process;

Actually, it wasn’t too hard to backwards convert the AS3 version - the three main things to do are to

  1. Take the code out of a document class structure, and onto the timeline - which in reality is mostly a copy and paste job, a bit of commenting out, and changing the events or function calls that initalise the code.
  2. Change variables and parameters, linkages and library classes; .scaleX to ._xscale, event names and listener arrangements, and library item classes.
  3. Rewrite code dealing with depths or the display list. - This is actually the most difficult part of the conversion, and really highlights how difficult depths were to work with, pre AS3.

There’s a little bit of code commenting in there, but if you’re interested in seeing how the two compare, I would suggest you head over to Shine Draw, download the AS3 version, download this version, and look at them side-by-side.

Resources;