My Milieu of Musings

Here is a great little script I found for detecting the OS. import flash.system.Capabilities; var flashPlayerVersion:String = Capabilities.version; var osArray:Array = flashPlayerVersion.split(' '); var osType:String = osArray[0]; //The operating system: WIN, MAC, LNX var versionArray:Array = osArray[1].split(',');//The player versions. 10,0,22,87 var majorVersion:Number = parseInt(versionArray[0]); var majorRevision:Number = parseInt(versionArray[1]); var minorVersion:Number = parseInt(versionArray[2]); var minorRevision:Number = parseInt(versionArray[3]);

I've been fighting GC in flash for the last two weeks. The standard answers (no timers, intervals, enterFrame listeners, strong references) do not apply. (And we also tried FP11, which theoretically gets rid of all of this for you anyway.) But I did run across a few nice event listener manger classes. Grant Skinner has his Janitor class (which I found attached to an online presentation). But even more impressive was Danny Miller's EventManager class (http://k2xl.com/wordpress/2008/07/02/as3-eventmanager-class-removealllisteners/) which is available on google code. Unfortunately, neither of these helped my situation; we were using a standard button component on the stage in a nested MC. If we didn't need it, we pitched it via removeChild() and nulled out the reference to it. Unfortunately, that was not sufficient, preventing the swf from unloading. So we are now building our own button class. grrrrr

The Atlanta ColdFusion User Group (www.acfug.org) has just announced their June Meeting: Ben Forta will be discussing new features of the impending release of ColdFusion and Flex.

The meeting will be held in the echoEleven facilities in Buckhead. Rumor has it that there will be an after-party for those interested, complete with Wii, Karaoke and adult beverages.

 

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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 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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