My Milieu of Musings

For years, I have been frustrated by Flash's inability to load files relative to a the swf doing the loading; instead, the referenced files have always been relative to the html file that is instantiating the swf object.

Then came the AS 3.0 FLVPlayback component.  This guy behaves differently.  When in the Flash authoring environment, it loads the skin and the flv source relative to the .swf file.  This is as expected.

However, when in an html page, it loads the skin relative the htm file, but the flv relative to the .swf file.

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We were setting up a new development environment today. As such, we were making sure all the tools were up to date. And suprise: Flex Builder 3.0.2 is begging to be downloaded. Here are the details: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/sdk32_fb302.html Most of the fixes/enhancements are related to Flash Player 10 (here is the link to solved issues: https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?pager/start=50).

We are currently working on a large project requiring hundreds of Flash assets. On of the requirements is to be able to detect the end of an animation; in Flash 8, you use _currentFrame == _totalFrames.  This naturally has changed in AS3 to currentFrame == totalFrames.  When using the AS3 notation (inside a Flex app) to examine the Flash 8/AS 2 file, both values come back null.

We discovered that some of them were published for Flash 8, and others for Flash 9. Problem....

ColdFusion to the rescue.

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As an Adobe Instructor, I often deal with debugging student code.  Often, mistakes are a result of simple typos.

When I was teaching advanced ActionScript 2.0 curricula, I strongly advocated using SE|PY.  It essentially examined the open file (usually a class file) and implemented IntelliSense based on what was typed previously within the file.  By simply choosing from the dropdown list, attentive students were able to avoid simple typos.

Unfortunately, SE|PY didn't do so well with ActionScript 3, often suggesting method calls that corresponded to ActionScript 2.0 instead of 3.0.

A reference to FlashDevelop came across my RSS feeds.  I marked it for later investigation, and promptly forgot about it.  On a whim, I went and checked it out while students were working on a self-directed lab.  After about 5 minutes, my interest was peaked enough to download it and try it out.  After 10 minutes of using it, I was sold.

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We've been working with Flare recently to visualize potential learner flows through elearning courses.  One of the cool features within flare is the ability to zoom in on a visualization via the mouse scrollwheel, similar to the browsers Ctrl-Scoll functionality to change font sizes.

Everything works fine in Flex, using the default html publishing templates, but we found that the scoll message was not being propigated through when using SWFObject.

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