Wassim Sidani

After months of work, we are glad to announce the immediate availability of the actionscript3 flash shopping cart.
Packed with lots of features (video support, multiple payment processors and gateways, supporting paypal, 2checkout and authorize.net) this new cart is probably the most flexible yet lightweight cart available today.

This actionScript3 shopping cart takes advantage of the rendering engine of flash player 9 and up, its performance exceeds actionscript2 carts by far and you can be sure your customers will receive first class user experience using our cart.

With a filesize less than 150 Kb, you will be amazed of the number of features this cart brings to your online store.

You can have several categories of goods sold through the cart, tangible and intangible (clothing, software, video lectures etc…). The cart supports all video and image formats supported by the flash player.

The cart comes in two flavors, an XML driven version and a mySQL+php adminPanel powered version; both flavors are ready to go products with no learning curves.\r\n

The XML driven version can run on any server, there are no special requirements, no database installation or server side scripting needed whatsoever.

The mySQL adminPanel powered version uses a mySQL database to store the details about the products and a php backend to manage the database through a very user friendly interface that makes sense!

Just fill in the details of each product, upload the images and you are ready to sell online.

Additional gateways and payment processors can also be incorporated into the cart upon request.

The actionscript3 flash shopping cart can be connected to an optional automatic delivery system (sold separately) which is extremely useful for digital goods; buyers can immediately download the digital product they bought without intervention by the merchant.

We offer two licensing schemes for maximum flexibility, a designer version and a developer version.

The designer package of the actionScript3 shopping cart does not include source code.

So what if you want to customize the look of the cart? Well it is easier than doing it yourself, you can simply send us a psd or a draft of your design and we can do that for you and send you the finished, ready to deploy, swf file.

A single license (works on one domain) costs 150 USD for the XML driven version and 250 USD for the adminPanel version.

The developer package allows you to do practically anything with the cart since full commented source code is included. The licensing scheme of the developer package is more flexible than the designer package since you can use the cart on an unlimited number of domains without restrictions.

The look and feel of the cart is easily customizable if you have the developer version, all you need is flash CS3 or higher and some basic flash knowledge.

The XML version of the developer package costs 1000 USD while the adminPanel powered version costs 1500 USD.

We offer free installation and technical support with every sale (applies for both the designer and developer versions).

We’re also capable of adding custom features, integrating the cart with existing flash sites, and translating the interface to different languages (additional fee, depends on complexity of the task).

Here’s the demo of the AS3 flash shopping cart, This version supports using videos as description of an item as well as a large picture or even an swf file.
the demo connects to paypal as payment gateway yet the retail version supports 2checkout and authorize.net as well. 

I had some free time to experiment and decided to port an application I wrote earlier to AS3. The scrollPane component is at the heart of this application and much to my surprise, the AS3 version has almost the same erratic behavior as the AS2 version when it comes to the scrollbars appearing when needed. It seems that we also need to find workarounds for the \”much faster, much cleaner version\” of actionscript i.e. AS3.\r\n

More About this in the coming days.\r\n

As a flash expert and enthusiast, I was thrilled when the release of the new Flash CS4 was announced. Like thousands of other flash coders, I went through the pain of downloading the trial version of Flash CS4 (almost one gigabyte large) just to find that the help files and API documentation were simply not there! The help menu takes you to adobe site to check the online version (if you are connected to the internet) or simply displays some very basic info with no code samples whatsoever.

I can now say with confidence, Adobe is following a pattern with every new release of Flash since CS3, the documentations are getting crappier with every release, not a good strategy if they want people to actually learn flash and if they want to expand the use of flash as a platform.

CS4 brought yet another disappointment to me and millions of RTF users, the “ligature” support is buried deep inside some user unfriendly classes and there is no simple way to access this essential feature for the average user by simply setting a property for a static or dynamic text field, way to go Adobe, really smart!\r\n

So was Flash CS4 really released or is this just another pre-release alpha quality software? The latter seems more probable.

Adobe recently announced Flash CS4, with great new features the flash community has been asking for, I had the chance the see the full package and I was impressed of the implementation of inverse kinematics, reminded me of moho’s (now anime studio) bones layers although moho’s offered much more options and flexibility, flash’s implementation is however dynamic i.e. we can script the bones and there’s a whole set of AS3 APIs for this purpose.

3D is also a much awaited feature yet papervision3D and alternative3D as well as other packages have much more than what adobe has to offer and are open source which make me wonder why adobe has not simply acquired and integrated one of these packages…

Again I feel that adobe is slowly but steadily removing the carpet from under the feet of AS2 developers, as I speculated, there’s no access to these goodies from within AVM1 i.e. AS2 is retiring in the eyes of the flash team and unless someone comes with some ingenious way to keep AS2 “hip and cool”, all of us AS2 guys will have to make the switch into the bitter AS3 beast with its unfriendly compiler that keeps yelling at you even you write one line of straight forward code…

One depressing find out is that RTL is not supported in static text fields, only in dynamic and input text fields with exotic ligature turned on.

So I had this customer who asked me to do an flv player for his site, he wanted the controls of the player to fade out when the user is idle, now flash does not have an onIdle event of any kind and the only way around this was to trigger a signal when the mouse kept its position (did not move) for more than 3 second (or x seconds, customizable) or keys has not been pressed for x seconds.

Again, flash does not have an onMouseStill event so I had to do it this way:


this.onMouseMove=function(){
clearTimeout(toInt);
fadeControlsIn();
toInt=setTimeout(fadeOut,3000);

}


A similar approach can be applied to keypresses.

Hope this helps.