I recently had a question forwarded to me by @gerhardlazu from @rbates asking how Flash links could behave like HTML links. What he meant was that when you’re on a HTML page and you hold down CTRL/CMD and click that link, it normally opens in a new tab.
Obviously, this is different in Flash as we have to tell flash to listen to that keyboard event and then set a variable that notifies the link to open it in a new window/tab.
I’ve come up with the solution, but it’s not the best, because, for example: you can’t force a browser to open a link in a new tab, the closet you can get to that is to get the link to open in “_blank” and hope the browser is clever enough.
So here’s the code, it uses my “ButtonSimple()” and “URLUtil()” classes that are both available on Github:
{
import com.firestartermedia.lib.as3.display.component.ButtonSimple;
import com.firestartermedia.lib.as3.utils.URLUtil;
import flash.display.Sprite;
import flash.display.StageAlign;
import flash.display.StageScaleMode;
import flash.events.KeyboardEvent;
import flash.events.MouseEvent;
import flash.text.Font;
import flash.text.TextFormat;
import flash.ui.Keyboard;
public class App extends Sprite
{
[Embed( systemFont='Arial', fontName='Arial', mimeType='application/x-font' )]
private var arialFont:Class;
private var isOver:Boolean = false;
private var button:ButtonSimple;
public function App()
{
stage.align = StageAlign.TOP_LEFT;
stage.scaleMode = StageScaleMode.NO_SCALE;
stage.addEventListener( KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN, handleKeyboardDown );
Font.registerFont( arialFont );
init();
}
private function handleKeyboardDown(e:KeyboardEvent):void
{
isOver = ( e.keyCode === Keyboard.CONTROL );
}
private function init():void
{
button = new ButtonSimple();
button.addEventListener( MouseEvent.CLICK, handleClick );
button.textFormat = new TextFormat( 'Arial', 24 );
button.draw();
addChild( button );
button.x = ( stage.stageWidth / 2 ) - ( button.width / 2 );
button.y = ( stage.stageHeight / 2 ) - ( button.height / 2 );
}
private function handleClick(e:MouseEvent):void
{
URLUtil.goToURL( 'http://www.ahmednuaman.com', ( isOver ? '_blank' : '_top' ) );
}
}
}
And this is what we get:
Cool eh? Tell me what you think!
