Actionscript for Flash 5 dummies: Scrolling a text box II - Page 5

Part 2: Getting rid of the hand cursor

As you probably have figured out by now, when you make a button in Flash, and you put your mouse over it, the cursor changes into a hand. This can be useful in certain circumstances, as the user can easily identify a clickable area.

However, in our case, the hand is just plain annoying. For one thing, users already know a scroller can be clicked, so there's no need to put visual emphasis on that point; in fact, it's just plain distracting. Secondly, the hand cursor is, in my opinion, a bit less precise. Finally, we want to emulate an everyday OS scroller here, and OS scrollers don't show the hand cursor.

So we need to get rid of the hand cursor. Unfortunately, there's no hidden setting in Flash that'll allow us to disable the hand cursor on a button. So we need to, as the PR people say, think outside the box. If there's no button, there's no hand cursor, right?

So we'll use a movie clip instead of a button for our up and down arrows. Go into containerMC, and delete the up and down buttons from the movie clip, as well as from the library. Don't be afraid, trust me on this one.

Now create a new movie clip and name it "upMC". Your movie clip should have two frames: the first one is the button in its normal (up) state, the second frame, the button in its hit (down) state. You can add your own graphics for the up and down states. Click on the first frame, go into the frame actions panel, and add a stop() action so that the movie clip doesn't constantly cycle between up and down.

For the graphics, I simply took a screenshot of a scroller (press the PrintScrn button on your keyboard, it's on the right of the F12 key), and pasted it (ctrl+V) into Fireworks. I then isolated the buttons and made separate images of them, and then imported them into Flash. Of course, as I mentionned earlier, you may use your own graphics if you want.

You can follow these steps again in order to create another movie clip named "downMC", which, you guessed it, will be the down arrow.

Now, go into containerMC, and place an instance of both upMC and downMC in it. Name your clips "up" and "down" in the instance properties. Your movieclip should look something like this: