ActionScript for Flash MX: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Appendix C: Backward Compatibility and Player Build Updates

The same is true of mblength() and length, mbsubstring() and substr(), and mbord()

and charCodeAt().

Whither Tell Target?

In Flash 4, Tell Target was our main tool for referring to movie clips. Tell Target,

bless its soul, was an unwieldy tool and is rendered obsolete by the much more ele-

gant object model introduced in Flash 5. The Tell Target function has been depre-

cated (i.e., retired from recommended use). Although we can still use the tellTarget()

function to code in a Flash 4 manner, tellTarget() may disappear in the future.

Consider the following code, which uses Tell Target to play an instance named

closingSequence:

Begin Tell Target ("closingSequence")

Play

End Tell Target

As of Flash 5, we simply invoke the much more convenient and readable play()

method on the

closingSequence instance:

closingSequence.play();

Tell Target could also perform multiple operations on an instance within a code

block, like so:

Begin Tell Target ("ball")

(Set Property: ("ball", x Scale) = "5")

Play

End Tell Target

As of Flash 5, the with() statement, described in Chapter 6, is the preferred way to

achieve similar results:

with (ball) {

_xscale = 5;

play();

}