Movie Clip Thumbnail Gallery

Question

I'm using Flash 8 Professional
Here's the swf:
http://208.131.133.122/flash/
And my fla:
http://208.131.133.122/flash/scene.fla
(8MB sorry!)
Right now, when the mouse is in the same _x position as the
last thumbnail, the thumbnails slide gently to the left to reveal
more thumbnails then slide back to the right when the mouse moves
to the left again.
The problem is that they start sliding to the left whether or
not the mouse is over the thumbnail gallery. If the mouse is at the
bottom of the screen or the top of the screen and in the same _x
position as the last thumbnail, they will begin sliding.
I would like the thumbnails to begin sliding only when the
mouse hovers over the row of thumbnails and not when it is outside
that thumbnail area.
I added some actionscript to stop the movement of the
movieclip when the mouse is above the max or below the min _y
position of the clip; but, it does not work.
I don't really know what I'm doing. Can someone.... anyone...
tell me if this is something that can be done? And if yes, how?
Much thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I see that your first wooden button is a 'scroll down' button
which plays through
the length of the thumbnails. Do you mean you want to
replicate and reverse this on the third wooden button 'scroll up' ?
I'm just guessing here but I'd say you accually have your
thumbnail gallery scrolling down as a motion tween and your scroll
up button just has a 'goto previous frame' type function on it?
If the previous statement is true then I would suggest two
options for you.
1.) You take the scrolling functionality out of a timeline
and do it all with action script. This would be the most effective
way of doing it.
2.) Since you probably don't want to make serious edits to
that .fla. Here's another way. You have a boolean called 'is_rev'
and a function called 'play_backwards'. These are contained within
the same movie clip as your thumbnail gallery.
<!-- code
var is_rev:Boolean = false;
-->
Your third wooden button has these actions on it.
on(release)
this.is_rev = true;
this.prevFrame(); // This is to start the reverse loop;
Your first wooden button would have this on it.
on(release)
this.is_rev = false;
this.play();
Your second wooden button would have this on it.
on(release)
this.is_rev = false;
The function would be:
function play_backwards()
if(this.is_rev)
this.preFrame();
Now on every single frame of your scrolling gallery you need
to call this.play_backwards();
Please note the way I structured the coding assumes every
object is on the same timeline. If your buttons are in a
different/parent movie clip relative to your gallery movie clip,
your going to need to make sure 'this' is set relative to the two
objects. (i.e. on your button -> this.prevFrame(); would
probably be this.gallery.prevFrame(); )
A quick design note. If your buttons symbolize scrolling not
movement they should be reversed since as the thumbnail gallery is
moving upwards the user is scrolling downwards.