Help with interactive 3D earth

Question

Hi,i'll keep it as short and simple as possible!
We're making a page with a flash element,and basicaly,in the end it should look something like this:
http://www.youtube.com/user/lifeinaday
Except that users would be able to add the speech bubbles themselves.So a Flash ball would be rotating,and clicking on it would make pop up a form,enabling the user to add text to a speech bubble,which would then be saved on the server.
Since i'm quite a novice in flash,some short basic guidelines of which tools to use,or any general help would be of GREAT help.
Thanks in advance!:)

Answer 1

If there is currently no interaction with the earth object and it is a movieclip symbol, you can add code to make it react to mouse interaction, the same way you would for any button if you know how.  If using the earth for that is difficult for some reason, then you could add any shaped movieclip over the earth, set its alpha property to 0, and then use that for the interaction.
For the form, you can create a movieclip that contains the form elements you intend the user to fill out, and control its visible property to hide/show it.  So when you click the earth, the form movieclip's vsisible property is changed to be true--and you may want to disable the earth clickability while the form is opened.  When you click the submit button of the form, you  set the form movieclip's visible property back to false--and enable the earth clicking if you disabled it.
For what goes on with processing the form, you are best off finding a tutorial to get you started on figuring out how to do it.  Use Google to search using terms like... "AS3 PHP MYSQL tutorial" or whatever system /lamguage elements you expect to be using for storing the data on the server.  Flash cannot directly save data to a server, so you need some form of server-side scripting such as PHP to act as a middle man for getting the data saved to the server.