One Response to “Creating a date countdown timer in ActionScript 3 / Flash”

1. Ans Says:
   March 8th, 2010 at 4:17 am

   I got a question about making the countdown timer blink in my provided example. To do this change the update interval (currently at one second) and change the textColor property on every update.

   First open CountDown.as and find:

   var ticker = new Timer(1000);

   and change to:

   var ticker = new Timer(500);

   So that it fires every half a second.

   Then open Main.as and find:

   	days.digit.text = daysLeft;
   	hours.digit.text = hoursLeft;
   	minutes.digit.text = minutesLeft;
   	seconds.digit.text = secondsLeft;

   Replace this with:

   	var origDays:int = days.digit.text;
   	var origHours:int = hours.digit.text;
   	var origMins:int = minutes.digit.text;
   	var origSecs:int = seconds.digit.text;
    
   	if (origDays-daysLeft != 0) 
   	{
   		days.digit.text = daysLeft;
   		days.digit.textColor = 0xff0000;
   	}
   	else
   	{
   		days.digit.textColor = 0x000000;
   	}
    
   	if (origHours-hoursLeft != 0) 
   	{
   		hours.digit.text = hoursLeft;
   		hours.digit.textColor = 0xff0000;
   	}
   	else
   	{
   		hours.digit.textColor = 0x000000;
   	}
    
   	if (origMins-minutesLeft != 0) 
   	{
   		minutes.digit.text = minutesLeft;
   		minutes.digit.textColor = 0xff0000;
   	}
   	else
   	{
   		minutes.digit.textColor = 0x000000;
   	}
    
   	if (origSecs-secondsLeft != 0) 
   	{
   		seconds.digit.text = secondsLeft;
   		seconds.digit.textColor = 0xff0000;
   	}
   	else
   	{
   		seconds.digit.textColor = 0x000000;
   	}

   This checks if the digit is updating, if it is, change the color to red, otherwise change it to black. Since the timer is firing every half a second the seconds will blink red.

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