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This tutorial will show you how to customize your cursor in three easy steps using Flash.
We are assuming you’ve already got your ad/animation/webpage ready to go, and now you want to customize your cursor to match. You can have some fun with this, making it a fancy arrow, a cross-hair, a little face, a pencil, a torn off hand, whatever you want – you can even make it animated.
Step 1: Make Your Cursor
I have made something resembling a bull’s-eye. Also, I am making it a little transparent using the Alpha settings in the Color Mixer. This way, when you slide your cursor over your animation, you can see through it to the background.
Here’s the cursor’s design:
You want to convert this shape to a symbol (F8 or Insert>Convert to Symbol), give it a behavior of Movie Clip, and name it something like “newcursor”.
Step 2: Giving Your newcursor an Instance
When you converted your new symbol into a movie clip, it saved it in your Library. If this is not open, open it now (F11, CTRL+L or Window>Library).
Go back to your blank stage and drag your new movie clip from the Library, onto the stage. You can resize your symbol now if you want to, but it’s not necessary.
Now, down in the Properties window (Window>Properties), change the Instance Name to “newcursor”. **When giving a symbol an instance name, it does not have to be the same name of the symbol itself, we are just happen to be using the same name.
Step 3: Make Your Cursor Live!
Open your Actions window (Window>Actions). Create a new layer at the top of your timeline and name it “actions”. Click on the first frame of this new layer.
Copy this ActionScript and paste it into your actions window (making sure you have that first frame of the new layer selected):
startDrag(“newcursor”, true);
Mouse.hide();
By looking at this code, it’s doing pretty much exactly what it says. It’s hiding the old cursor, and dragging the new cursor with the instance name of “newcursor”. Now you know why we gave it an instance name, since not all symbols need one. When we named it, we essentially gave it a name for the ActionScript code to look for. This code is only applied to the symbol with the instance name “newcursor”.
Save and publish! We’re done!
Topics: Action Script, cursor, Flash
