Preloading in Flash CS3

You'd think that something as important and standard as a preloader would be simple in the latest version of Flash. Not only is preloading pretty much undocumented - probably because there are so many ways to do it - the information both in books and on the internet is fairly sparse. So far, I've found at least four different techniques and none of them to my liking.

What's even more daunting is to find out how it's implemented - with classes. Now I've been using Flash since version 2 and I'm pretty fluent in AS 2.0, but this whole business about classes in CS3, although it's slowly sinking in, is a bit much. Instead of a few lines of code, now I need a whole separate .as file as a document class for my Flash file?!? Try teaching that to first time Flash users!

Anyhow, I thought I'd share what I found, so you could pass it along. First there's this post over at BIT-101 entitled: Preloaders in AS3. For something a little more straightforward, you can try Koen De Weggheleire's solution, which doesn't require a class, but isn't all that flexible either: Preloader in Flash CS3 - Actionscript 3.0 way. Weggheleire follows up with another tutorial on a different technique, this time with a class: More About Preloading in Flash CS3. This approach is promising and easy to tweak. Finally, there's ProgressBar Component of Flash CS3, by Flep. This technique utilizes the Progress Bar Component included in Flash CS3.

Actually, preloading has never been an exact science and everybody has different approaches to the whole thing. I just think Adobe could've implemented it better in this release.