Space. The final frontier. Also, our latest widget. I am totally ruining the cadence and meaning of this iconic phrase.

Yes, we just completed a new widget. The NASA Image of the Day widget. We are fans of space and space exploration. If you are also a fan of these things, put this widget on your site.

As I transition from AS2 to AS3, I find that sometimes what used to be accomplished in few steps now takes more. One of these is the old AS2 LoadVars object. It was pretty straight forward, but now it requires multiple classes and methods to make work. This is not necessarily a bad thing, AS3 is, in my opinion, leaps and bounds ahead of AS2, but that doesn’t mean we can’t all work together to make things easier for ourselves.

So, in that vain, I offer up my first ever AS3 Class - the VariableLoader (zip). It takes all the new steps and packages them in something that feels a little more like the old method. Included in the .zip file are the class, the package directory structure, and an example usage file. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask me at dave [at] step7design.com

I can’t guarantee that this is the best, most fool-proof, amazing AS3 class ever coded in the history of the Internet. But I can tell you that for my own AS3 development it has made things a little easier.