How to make a Christmas countdown e-card for Christmas Eve surprise

Send a sealed Christmas e-card with countdown on it can be a good Christmas Eve surprise. In this extension topic on making Christmas flash e-cards, you will learn how to wonderful Christmas countdown e-card for Christmas Eve. The process is easy and fast.

Christmas Eve is a silent night. Most people fall asleep with sweet dreams, but some people are just too excited for the coming Christmas and Christmas gifts to get in bed. So they usually watch Christmas movies or surf the internet on their PCs or laptops to pass time. If you happen to know one of your friends is going to stay up on Christmas Eve, you can catch the opportunity to send him/her a sweet Christmas surprise. With a special Christmas e-card which is set to open right at the moment when Christmas enters the world, it is sure that your Christmas greeting is the first one he/she sees on Christmas day. Doesn’t that sound great? And what I am going to talk about today is how to make a Christmas countdown e-card for Christmas Eve.

Get started with the Christmas countdown e-card

First, download our Christmas countdown e-card source FLA file. To view and edit the source file, you should have Adobe Flash CS4 installed. The appearance of the Christmas countdown e-card looks as below. I boost the running of countdown so you can quickly preview the overall effect of the card. Refresh the page to get a fresh countdown.

Remember what I have told you in a previous post? You don’t really need to make a Christmas flash e-card from scratch. It is also ingenious and creative when you just change the elements displayed in the Christmas e-card. If you can’t catch my point here, that post is a better check out.

Apart from the elements, you can change the countdown mechanism: end the countdown earlier or postpone it, make it count faster or slower. By altering the countdown parameters, you can actually set any time as the endpoint of the countdown but the default one, 00:00:00 on December 25. So you wouldn’t get frustrated when your friend suddenly decides to sleep earlier. Let me tell you the way to do it easy and fast.

Altering countdown parameters

Return to the stage level as you first open the source file. Locate and select the first frame of the uppest layer. You may find it at the top left corner of the timeline with a small "a" tag on it. The tag indicates there are codes and parameters that are called "ActionScript" in the frame. Select the frame and press "F9" key to call out the "Action Panel", the editor for the codes and parameters.
Take the following code for example:

var thentime:Date=new Date(2009,11,25,0,0,0);//represents the start of Christmas day

This line is responsible for the input of countdown destination, as it has been set to 00:00:00 on December 25, 2009. The month figure could be a little confusion, because the ActionScript numbers month from 0 to 11. So "11" here is actually representing December.

var timer:Timer=new Timer(500);//how fast it ticks, 500 = 1 sec

This line controls how frequent the countdown ticks. You can simply change the parameter for bigger than 500 to slow it, or otherwise to quicken it.

There are several more lines in which you can change the numeral parameters safely for your own sake. Explanations are given to each of those lines behind double slashes "//". If you are an advanced user of Adobe Flash CS4, feel free to modify anything in the source file.

Here are additional font resources which are used in the Christmas countdown e-card demo. Use them to spice up your Christmas e-card in no time. Download the Christmas font resource package.

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