Yesterday, I’ve posted about interesting AS3 Class InteractivePNG, and now I’m adding new addition for solving other problem with transparent Bitmaps. If you have transparent bitmap with whitespace around image and you want to crop whitespace around “real” image, you can use this function…

public static function getBitmapCroppedOutWhitespace(bd:BitmapData):Bitmap
{
	var bmd:BitmapData = new BitmapData(bd.width, bd.height, true, 0x00000000);
	bmd.draw(bd);
 
	var rect:Rectangle = bmd.getColorBoundsRect(0xFFFFFF, 0x00000000, false);
	var bmd2:BitmapData = new BitmapData(rect.width, rect.height, true, 0x00000000);
	bmd2.draw(bmd, new Matrix(1,0,0,1, -rect.x, -rect.y));
 
	var bmp:Bitmap = new Bitmap(bmd2);
 
	return bmp;
}

From BitmapData it creates Bitmap without whitespace. It will find whitespace automaticaly and removes it. If you want to insert Bitmap data instead of BitmapData, just edit this function slightly. This is just idea how to do such cropping. Enjoy, I hope it will be useful for someone.

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In my latest project I need generate Excel .xls file from Flex. Because in Flex or Flash there is no support for such generation, I’ve to do it manually and I want to share this knowledge with all of you in this new tutorial serie. Because content of Excel file can vary this will be serie of posts. And this information is for all developers not only for Flash or Flex coders, because this is general information about generating .xls Excel file, only some parts can contain some ActionScript code.

Different ways of generating .xls file

There is many ways for generating .xls file, I will not write about all ways, just about ways, which were suitable for my Flex project. As probably all of you know .xls is binary file, but it’s not always true. I will write about this later.

How to start with generating .xls Excel file

Maybe best thing at the start is make test .xls file and save it and look at source code. As I told .xls has binary data format, but you have possibilities to save file as Webpage or XML file, and that’s what we want. So we got 2 text formats available:

• HTML
• XML

So SUPER SECRET is simple:

Save your html or xml file as .xls file – Excel will do the rest.

In next part I will show you some simple generation of .xls Ecel file with some styling. Stay tuned and subcribe to my RSS Feed or Follow me at Twitter

If you want make just pure AS3.0 project, not Flex project, there is problem with Tween. Adobe has not included Tween to pure AS3.0 project, it’s included in Flex framework library (at least I don’t know something). So you have few possibilites how to use Tween in your project. By including Flex framework library, make your own Tween Class, or use any already built framework, packages which has custom Tween class inside.

Let me know, how you are using Tween in your AS3.0 projects, maybe you will help someone.

Here is list of already build Tween classes for you (I will update it, when someone point out new class):

• http://code.google.com/p/tweener/