Well, each of us is waiting for something nice – birthday, vacation, weekend. As a soccer fan I am waiting for the FIFA World Cup 2010 which takes place in South Africa and begins on 11th June 2010. I am counting down the days but I can say it’s not that easy. Because of this I made a Flash countdown timer and now it is much easier.

So let’s get started with our countdown timer.

1. Create a new Flash CS3 document and save it under the name “countdown.fla”.
2. Now create a new dynamic text field and name it “time_txt”. Here we’ll put the time that remains to the beginning of the world cup championship. For this tutorial I am using font downloaded from here. To fully complete this tutorial you have to download this font and to install it on your system. Choose #009900 for font color and 24 for font size. Embed the font like this:

3. Now we have to move to actionscript. Create a new layer called “actions” and on its first keyframe press F9 to go to the “Actions” panel. Here is the code:

//First we create a date object. Note that we count the months from "0"!
var endDate:Date = new Date(2010, 5, 11);
//next we create a timer that will update the time every second
var timer:Timer = new Timer(1000);
//we add an event listener to the timer and then we start it
timer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, updateTime);
timer.start();
//Calculate the time remaining as it is being updated
function updateTime(e:TimerEvent):void{
	//we create a variable to hold the current date
	var currentDate:Date = new Date();
	//we calculate the time to FIFA World Cup 2010
	var timeLeft:Number = endDate.getTime() - currentDate.getTime();
	//we convert the remaining time into seconds, minutes, hours, and days
	var seconds:Number = Math.floor(timeLeft / 1000);
	var minutes:Number = Math.floor(seconds / 60);
	var hours:Number = Math.floor(minutes / 60);
	var days:Number = Math.floor(hours / 24);

	seconds %= 60;
	minutes %= 60;
	hours %= 24;

	//we convert the numbers to strings
	var sec:String = seconds.toString();
	var min:String = minutes.toString();
	var hrs:String = hours.toString();
	var d:String = days.toString();

	//if we have a single digit we add "0" in front of it
	if (sec.length < 2) {
	    sec = "0" + sec;
	}

	if (min.length < 2) {
	    min = "0" + min;
	}

	if (hrs.length < 2) {
	    hrs = "0" + hrs;
	}

	//we create a variable to hold all elements and then we add it to our text field
	var time:String = d + ":" + hrs + ":" + min + ":" + sec;
	time_txt.text = time;
}

And here is the final result: