Flash Timer Count Elapsed Time Since China’s Earthquake

To support the relief effort for China’s earthquake, the china-earthquake-relief.com needs a Flash timer to remind the time elapsed since the earthquake stroke at 14:28 May 12, 2008. So we made one.

It’s a Flash application developed right out of Adobe Flash CS3 Professional. It can be easily down with Flex but then the size of the swf could be much bigger than a pure Flash one.

There are not too much tricks once get the time calculation figured out, which is much harder than I thought. The main code is here:

stop();
countDownTxt.autoSize = true;

var year = 2008;
var month = 05;
var day = 11;
var hour = 23;
var minute = 28;
var date1 = new Date(year, month - 1, day, hour, minute);
trace(date1)

function countdown() {
    date2 = new Date();
    //trace(date2)
    difSec = Math.floor((date2 - date1)/1000);
    sec = difSec % 60;
    difMin = Math.floor(difSec/60);
    min = difMin % 60;
    difHours = Math.floor(difMin/60);
    hours = difHours % 24;
    days = Math.floor(difHours/24);
    if (sec < 10) {
        sec = “0″ + sec;
    }
    if (min < 10) {
        min = “0″ + min;
    }
    if (hours < 10) {
        hours = “0″ + hours;
    }

    if(days < 0) {
        //trace(”the countdown is over”);
        gotoAndStop(2);
    }

    if(days < 10) {
        days = “00″ + days;
    }
    if(days < 100 && days >= 10) {
        days = “0″ + days;
    }

    countDownTxt.text = days + ” Days “ + hours + ” Hr “ + min + ” Min” + ” “ + sec + ” Sec”;

}
var intervalID = setInterval(countdown, 100);

countdown();

Something to be noted:

• You can switch the date2 and date1 in difSec = Math.floor((date2 - date1)/1000); to make the app to be either countdown or countup (time elapsed, in my case)
• The initial variables are the time you want to start counting at. In the China Earthquake case, I factored in that based on PTS (GMT -8) time zone. Obviously, if you are in a different time zone, the elapsed time will be wrong.
• So, it’ll be nicer to take in the initial variables from flashvars. Go knock yourself off on that. That’s why you can get all the source here.

So, go download the flashtimer.zip from here. It contains the swf and fla files. If you made improvements, drop me a copy please.