In this post I’ll show how to save a file from AS3 to your local HD. In another post I’ve explained how to load a file from HD to Flash.

For a project I’ve been looking around for a decent solution to the problem of saving a text file (to be more precise XML file) from Actionscript 3 to my local harddisc but i couldn’t find a solution for this (what not necessarily means that there is none).

Saving and loading can be smoothly achieved with Adobe Air but not with Flash because Flash has been designed to run on the web. However, it is possible to download and upload files via AS3 on and from your HD to and from a webserver. Think of an Flash MP3 shop: You can click on an MP3 in Flash and you will be asked where to save the file and afterwards the file is being downloaded to the chosen location on your HD. So it must be somehow possible.

Additionally, it is possible to create XML or other text in Flash and store it on a webserver and vice versa.

Thus I came upon following solution:

Figure 1: Howto save and load text files with AS3

Bill Buxton is the absolute expert for touch-related human computer interaction research. Bill Buxton’s impressive amount of publications has started around 30 years ago and have never ceased since then. Among other things he is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft and participates in the Microsoft Surface research.

I especially like his research work about two-handed input as it tells a lot about how two-handed input could be employed in multi-touch setups. It is simple to make applications that use two hands but it is difficult not to overstrain the user. Thus, I endorse his theory about compound tasks that apply natural tasks to each hand: E.g. when you are right-handed and you are writing a text on a sheet of paper you will use your left hand to hold the paper in place and move the paper in a way that your right hand is only writing in one region. Hence, the left hand performs gradual tasks while the right hand is doing the precise and high-frequent work. With other words, for two-handed input in multi-touch you could choose tasks (for right-handed people) that give the left hand a helper function and give the right hand a fine-tune task.

However, what I actually wanted to do in this post was to set a link to Bill Buxton’s multi-touch page.