Making a Jigsaw Puzzle in Flash

To do the above Jigsaw Puzzle use the mouse to click on a piece, and keep the mouse button held down. Move the piece to a new location, and then release the mouse button to drop it into position.

If all goes well, then the final puzzle should finish up like this:

Making a Jigsaw Puzzle is an excellent introduction to Actionscript 2.0 for people that have never used this feature of Flash.

I use this activity with beginners to Flash, to show them how we can bring what the mouse is doing, into our actual Flash project, and we do this by writing script.

The other great thing about the activity, is that the people doing it choose their own picture to use for making the puzzle, and this gives them greater enthusiasm and ownership of the learning task.

The following is a viewable embedded PDF of detailed instructions on how to make a puzzle like this. Unfortunately, the PDF is over 1 meg in size, and so takes a while to load in.

The other limitation is that due to blogger column width limitations, we can only have the PDF viewing window a maximum width of 550 pixels.
(I have widened my blog from 400 to 550, there is a separate post on this).

If you would like to have your own copy of this PDF, then simply click the save disk icon button on the PDF viewer, and you should be able to save it to your own hard disk.

Alternatively, you can view or save the PDF by clicking the link below:

Click here to open or save the PDF

If you are wondering how we make a viewable and scrollable PDF within a blog, (or any web page), then click on the image below.



I found out how to do this by "Googling", and it involves using an "iframe". It works much better on normal web pages, where the width of the iframe can be set to 800 pixels, so that the PDF is near normal size.

Enjoy,

Big Passy Wasabi

Inserting a Flash SWF into a Blogger Post

Maybe you are wondering exactly how the above Flash SWF animation file was embedded into this blog post.

Well it was done by editing the HTML of the post, to have an embedded flash object contained in it. This was done by typing in the following html:


(Click the above image to see it full size and read the text. )

The big potential drawback is that you need to have your swf file on a website somewhere that you can make a link to from within your blog html. My "beauty_beast" swf file is on an old unused website I have at: http://www.passyworld.com/.

If you do not have a website to use, you might be able to make a free one at somewhere like: http://sites.google.com/, http://geocities.yahoo.com/http://www.spaces.live.com/, or http://www.justfree.com/
Possibly you can then upload an swf file to the freesite, and then link to it from within a blog.

If anyone tries out a free site and loads up an swf for linkage, let me know if it works out ok. I will also place it on my list of things to do sometime in 2009.

Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi

The Wonders of OpenOffice.org

Open Office is great if you have Powerpoint Presentations, and you want to convert them into Flash SWF's that can be added to a web page.

Open Office is free and can be downloaded from here:
Click Here for Open Office Download Page

To convert a Powerpoint presentation, click on "Presentation" on the Open Office welcome screen. It is then a matter of browsing to your powerpoint and opening it up in Open Office :



This should bring the PPT into the presentation editor. To make the Flash SWF, all we have to do is do File > Export > (name of our file) and then change the "file format" output type from the default .xpm to Flash .swf, simply by clicking the drop down list of format types.

We will then have a SWF file produced like this one here:
(Click on the current slide below to advance to next slide).



The only drawback is that in the Flash version, we do not have all the slide transition effects of the original PowerPoint.

If you would like to download a copy of the above PowerPoint presentation, (in MS PPT 2003 format) then click the link below:
View the above "Fireworks" Presentation in PPT

If you would like to download a copy of the above Powerpoint presentation, (in Adobe PDF format) then click the link below:
View the PowerPoint Presentation as a PDF

If you are wondering how we inserted the SWF flash file into a blog; well that sounds like a good idea for my next post.


Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi

About this Blog

Hi fellow ICT'ers. As you can see from the recent picture of me at the park, my skills at Australian football have suffered badly as a result of my ICT addictions. I guess I just don't get out and about as much as I used to.

The purpose of this blog is to share some ICT activities with other people, particularly those involved with education and training, which is my own current occupation. I used to have a "real job" in the IT industry for several wonderful years, but sadly that was off-shored under the economic rationale of globalisation. eg. Would you like papadams with that ?

However leaving the city based 12 hour office-ridden working lifestyle has turned out to be a blessing and a godsend. My pizza and coke intake has lowered to a much healthier level, (and so have my cholesterol levels ! ). The really good thing is that I am still having lots of fun making and doing all sort of things with ICT.

Googling the web has revealed some nice ways of adding Flash content, viewable PDF's, and several other items to blogs. I hope to use as many of these as possible via editing raw blog HTML.

On this blog I hope to tell others how to do likewise.

Anyway, enough of the rambling, and let's get on with it !!

Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi