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.