This is also an old one, done in AS2. There’s nothing that special about it, except maybe the curveTo method of getting the mouse wire to follow with the mouse like that. But like I said, not that special, I just find it really creative and amusing. 
Now this is an old one - done way back in the day of AS2. 
What is it and why did I do it? I think every great flasher has spent some time, or should!, on John’s (of RED Interactive) Self Titled portfolio site. It’s incredible and I kept wondering how that circular menu was possible.. So I started to mess around in Flash with circles, trigonometry, lineTo, etc. So here’s the little copycat version of the grand master’s design.
Just a little experiment I did with a masked blur effect on an image. Could maybe be used to create a cool menu.. Enjoy.
FPS
It is good to have a FPS (frames per second) value that is not too slow, but not too fast. The default value is 12, which is too slow. It’s too slow, because when you create animations on the timeline, it will look slow and blocky. I know many expert flashers keep it at 24 fps, which is a good speed. It is fast enough so that the animations will look smooth, but slow enough so that the user’s computer won’t lag. For example, if there are a ton of animations playing at once, the flash player might lag because it takes a lot of CPU to play. Further more if the animations are frame based and the fps value is jacked up to something like 40 or 50, it will lag a lot more. However, the great people over at Adobe are constantly working at performance, among other things, and are setting impressive milestones of increasing Flash’s performance and CPU usage. There was a major bump in performance from Flash 8 and AS2 to Flash CS3 and AS3. When using AS3, the Flash Player uses a entire new virtual engine to process the file and code, which is much better than the old versions and engine because it is much more strict and streamlined. But I always keep my FPS value at 30. As long as you keep the processing usage in mind, I advise just finding a value that you are comfortable with.
Branding and self-promotion / marketing
When you work for yourself you really need to sell yourself! As wrong as this may sound, it is true. Word of mouth and reputation is probably the best way of getting your name and your services around, earning you new clients. There’s tons of things you can do to get out there: a great portfolio, a blog, keeping your clients happy, network through people with relevant connections, a memorable logo, job board posts, etc. The good news is once you get a good client base, it will be more cost effective work rather than surfing the web for jobs (or elsewhere). Also keep in mind that branding can be a big factor for the spread for word of mouth. Of course, branding includes your portfolio, logo, business cards; the look and feel of you! 
Hi. My name is Christian Kragh and I'm a freelance Flash designer / developer. Welcome to my blog where I write and hopefully discuss any topics related to freelancing or Flash. I'm currently located in Rochester, NY.
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