Brian Milinski | St. Norbert College CSCI 460
2/27/2012
Today I began using the on screen keyboard utility to get information from the user. By placing a text field on the screen and setting the stage.focus property equal to the text field variable I was able to get the on screen keyboard to place the on screen keyboard characters into my Flash application. I also experimented with flash based on screen keyboards, but found them to be less effective because I already have a tool that does what I need as far as getting input. One thing I learned from this experience was how to use packages. A package in flash is a portable way of using a class. You can build a package and use its class definition in multiple different applications, which is useful when wanting to reuse code. To use the package you must import it to the action script file using import "file name".
I also experimented with text formatting in the text field. The default text was too small so I was able to alter the settings using a variable called TextFormat, along with the variable TextField. Now that I have user input working the way that I want, I will work on limiting the text field to only accepting email addresses. Additionally I gained experience with placing items on the "Stage" or screen of my application, and I have provided the resources I used to get this information below.
Here are some links that I found useful:
Packages Input Field The "Stage"