Real-Time Analog Clock

The SWF File

Until Flash 4 the only way to get the system's clock information into a movie was using a Java Script code in the HTML file and make everything work with the help of FS Command. So if you wanted to have a real time clock in your movie this was the only way to go. One of the disadvantages of this kind of solution is that it is not possible to do the trick unless the movie is loaded from a HTML document in a browser.

Now with Flash 5 and the new Action Script things became much easier. Macromedia has transformed Action Script in a sort of Flash version of Java Script (both languages are based on the same standard document, ECMA-262) so a lot of the code that had to do the job from the HTML document can now be created inside Flash.

In this tutorial I show you how to do the clock trick using just Action Script, four MovieClips and no HTML. So now you can build your clock and run it as a projector file as well as in a Web page presentation.