About

Keith Peters

DESIGNER TO DESIGNER

an Apress company

2006 by Keith Peters

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher.

ISBN (pbk): 1590595181

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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For information on translations, please contact Apress directly at 2560 Ninth Street, Suite 219, Berkeley, CA 94710. Phone [phone], fax [phone], e-mail info @apress.com, or visit www.apress.com.

The information in this book is distributed on an as is basis, without warranty. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this work, neither the author(s) nor Apress shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in this work.

The source code for this book is freely available to readers at www.friendsofed.com in the Downloads section.

Credits

Lead Editor
Chris Mills

Technical Reviewer
Todd Yard

Editorial Board
Steve Anglin, Dan Appleman, Ewan Buckingham, Gary Cornell, Tony Davis, Jason Gilmore, Jonathan Hassell, Chris Mills, Dominic Shakeshaft, Jim Sumser

Project Managers
Laura Cheu and Richard Dal Porto

Copy Edit Manager
Nicole LeClerc

Copy Editors
Marilyn Smith, Ami Knox, and Nicole LeClerc

Assistant Production Director
Kari Brooks-Copony

Production Editor
Kelly Winquist

Compositor
Dina Quan

Proofreader
Elizabeth Berry

Indexer
John Collin

Cover Image Designer
Corn van Dooren

Interior and Cover Designer
Kurt Krames

Manufacturing Director
Tom Debolski

Dedication

To Kazumi and Kristine, who saw way too much of the back of my head silhouetted by a computer monitor while I was writing this. OK, now we are going to the park.

About the Author

Keith Peters is a Flash developer in the Boston area. He has been working with Flash since 1999 and is currently the senior flash architect at Flash Composer (www.flashcomposer.com). Keith has been a contributing author to eight other friends of ED books. But probably his biggest claim to fame is his personal website, www.bit-101.com, where he strives to create a new and unique Flash experiment each day. This has resulted in over 700 open source Flash examplesprobably the largest single author repository of open source Flash material on the Web.

Acknowledgments

Todd Yard, this books technical reviewer, for excellent technical reviewing, keeping me honest, and lending me large portions of Chapter 17.

Steve Rycroft, my editor at friends of ED for several years , for keeping me busy cranking out other chapters while this book fermented in my head.

Chris Mills, this books editor, for taking my concept of the book and finally making it a reality.

Marilyn Smith, this books copy editor, for making me sound much more intelligent than I actually am.

All the people in the ActionScript, Math, and Physics forums at Flashkit and Were-Here, from 1999 through 2003. You put most of these ActionScript weapons in my hands; I insist you take some responsibility for what Ive done with them.

About the Technical Reviewer

Todd Yard is a lead Flash developer at Brightcove (www.brightcove.com) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has contributed as an author or technical editor on 11 other friends of ED Flash books, including Flash 8 Essentials and Extending Flash MX 2004 .

About the Cover Image Designer

Corn van Dooren designed the front cover image for this book. Having been given a brief by friends of ED to create a new design for the Foundation series, he was inspired to create this new setup combining technology and organic forms.

With a colorful background as an avid cartoonist, Corn discovered the infinite world of multimedia at the age of 17a journey of discovery that hasnt stopped since. His mantra has always been "The only limit to multimedia is the imagination ," a mantra that is keeping him moving forward constantly.

After enjoying success after success over the past yearsworking for many international clients , as well as featuring in multimedia magazines, testing software, and working on many other friends of ED booksCorn decided it was time to take another step in his career by launching his own company, Project 79 , in March 2005.

You can see more of Corns work and contact him through the websites www.cornevandooren.com or www.project79.com.

If you like his work, be sure to check out his chapter in New Masters of Photoshop: Volume 2 , also by friends of ED (ISBN 1590593154).