This is my latest creation using Flash and ActionScript 3. You can draw a lovely doodle on one of your Flickr photos and then save it and send it to your friends.

It started as a simple doodle program, but I thought adding Flickr photos would make it more fun. It uses the Flickr API to load the photos and a web service I've written in ASP.NET to save and load the doodles.

I've been sending people Christmas doodles this year as Christmas eCards.

So, why not go and doodle on your photos and send them to your friends.

I've been making an animated button using a MovieClip in Flash using ActionScript 3. The problem I had was making the hand cursor appear over it, firstly at all and then when my button had text in it.

To make a MovieClip behave like a button and use the hand cursor set the following properties for the MovieClip.

clip.buttonMode = true;
clip.useHandCursor = true;

Next, if your MovieClip contains a TextField set the following property for the TextField.

clip.labelText.mouseEnabled = false;

This means that the button underneath deals with the mouse, so the cursor will behave in the way that the button tells it to. In the example in this post, Button 1 has the mouseEnabled set to the default true value and Button 2 sets it to false.

I have an ActionScript Class file linked to the button that does all this to keep my main movie code clean. 

This Flickr viewer uses Flash CS3, ActionScript 3 and the Flickr API to display public photos from a selected user's Flickr account. I've created it because I've got a few project ideas where you will need to select a photo from Flickr. I've been impressed with the improved object orientedness of ActionScript 3 and this has let me build this in a way where all the different bits can be re-used very easily.

This has been a nice project to get my head round some of the new features in ActionScript 3. I've been particularly impressed with the new way of loading and using XML. It's so much easier and just makes sense. The event model has also been much improved.

I'm also very impressed with the Flickr API. It's great to be able to take the wealth of content they've got and play about with it. In the future I hope to play about with some other APIs. I love how sites are offering APIs and letting people extend and join up their services. I think the joined up web offers some amazing possibilities.

Adobe has been running round the country doing lots of workshops. Their campus tour is aimed at students and university staff, but I was lucky enough to be invited by a member of staff.

I went to three 45 minute workshops about different Adobe products. The instructor raced through the various useful new features and I tried to keep up with my note taking. I was able to relax in the Dreamweaver session because I knew a lot of it, but I couldn't afford to blink in the Photoshop and Illustrator session.

The instructor made it all look very easy, but now I come to look through my notes I realise it's going to take me a while to learn how to use the things he showed us.

The first thing I've managed to learn and actually do, is to use the Adobe photomerge tool. I've always liked the pictures David Hockney made by joining together lots of Polaroid pictures and I was wondering why I was starting to see lots of examples of people creating similar affects. It turns out they've discovered this Photoshop tool as well.

You can find this tool in all CS versions of Photoshop. It's in File > Automate > Photomerge. It takes a collection of files, automatically positions them so they all join up, blends the joins and also sorts out the perspective. I'm sure you could fool it with a difficult picture, but I'm very impressed. Here is an example I've done of the Corn Exchange that uses 6 photos I took. I would have cropped it, but I've left the edges to give you a better idea of how the joining worked.

• See a bigger version of my Corn Exchange picture on Flickr.