..or so he calls it. My good friend Michael Avila, Roger Braunstein and Jeff Yamada made this way awesome system for asynchronous action-handling in Actionscript3.0.

I suggest you go check it out:
some basic async stuff - kirupaForum

We knew ahead of time that we’d be dealing with a lot of the obvious stuff like loading, animating, preparing displays, but we needed to come up with a clean way to deal with the asynchronous nature of these things.
We decided to implement a system which would allow us to observe the status of some asynchronous action through the use of asynchronous tokens. These asynchronous tokens dispatch events which specify whether or not the asynchronous action it represents completed successfully or with failure.
kirupa.com/forum/showthread.php?t=270148

Perhaps some of you may not know this, but event-bubbling in Actionscript3.0 is way cool and well worth your attention. So read on.

With event-bubbling you can let one Event subsequently call on every ancestor (containers of containers of etc.) of the DisplayObject that originally dispatched the Event, all the way up to the surface (read: Stage), hence the name ‘bubbling’.
Perhaps noteworthy is that bubbling for an Event instance is disabled by default, and can only be activated by setting the bubbling parameter in the Event constructor.

Although the documentation doesn’t seem to make it all too apparent, event-bubbling is actually the reason why the Event class has a currentTarget property (as well as a target property).
So what is the use of Event.currentTarget? While the target property will always have its value set to the DisplayObject that originally dispatched the Event, the currentTarget property always points to the DisplayObject that the event is currently processing (i.e. bubbling at).

Now, you will probably not always want your Event to bubble all the way up to the Stage of your movie. This is where the cancelable property comes into the picture.
Setting the cancelable property contructor-parameter to true allows you to call the stopPropagation() and stopImmediatePropagation() methods later on. Both methods basically abort the bubbling process.
The difference here is that the latter also aborts execution of other listeners for the same Event-type on the same currentTarget, whereas the former only aborts execution of listeners to subsequent targets.

The following example attempts to visualize the concept of event-bubbling in AS3. Click the big button in the middle to dispatch a bubbling Event, and tick the CheckBoxes to have that Event canceled at a specific parent of the Button. Right-click to view source.

For more information, read up in Trevor McCauley’s excellent article about event handling in AS3.

Yesterday I got back from my holidays with Dave in Nottingham, so today I decided to fix some major bugs in the Book beta.

In the first beta a page-corner would sometimes ’stick’ to the user’s mouse (dubbed the sticky-page bug).
The second bug was that when the user would open the Book and then close it, an Error would be thrown (the book-opening bug)..
Both of the above bugs have been fixed in the second beta, for more information please see the bugs-section in the original beta blog-post.

The second beta demo is now online:
Demo
Source
Documentation

I also created a very basic usage-example for the Book component. The original demo was meant to show off as many features and as much functionality as possible.
As a side-effect though, the main application MXML-file might give the impression that using the Book component gets really complicated. The contrary is true.

You can view/download the simple demo here:
Simple demo
Simple demo source

So here it is, the beta version of my Flex Book component. The source-code is included and free for all of you to look into (mind that it is licenced under a Creative Commons licence).

Demo
Source
Documentation

UPDATE: I also created a simpe demo to demonstrate the simplicity of using the Book classes, you can view/download it here:
Simple demo
Simple demo source

There are still a few performance-optimalisations to be made, so I welcome any (constructive) feedback on the Book component. If you spot any bugs or possibilities for optimalisation then please send me an email (my email-address can be found on the contact-page).
If you have any feedback other than bug-reports and suggestions for optimalisation, then please post them in the comments.

In the next week I will hopefully put up a simple demo as well to point out the simplicity of the usage of the Book component.

» ..read on

Today I had a little chat with Thomas Pfeiffer, who created the Sandy 3D engine.
A while ago I came across his AS2 image-distortion class. Remembering that while implementing hardback-pageflip functionality in my Book component, I decided to port the class to AS3.
Thomas was so kind to give me permission to publish my AS3 version of his class on my blog, so here it is:

Demo
Source
Documentation

UPDATE:
Tam Ho posted this link to a Flash CS3 example in the comments, here it is:
flashteam.com.au/dev/DistortImageAS3FlashCS3.zip