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Thursday, October 29, 2009

[Solved] Printing HTML with SWF(s) not as empty containers

Thursday, October 29, 2009    1 Comments

I've been pulling my hair out a bit lately wondering why some websites with SWF content on pages print with the SWFs rendered to the printer and some websites don't. You end up with a page with empty holes where the SWFs reside.

After digging around a bit and testing some local content, here is the trick.

wmode = "window" works, wmode = "transparent" does not.

That's really about it. I was playing around using SWFObject, various javascript embeds, etc. and it all boiled down to that one parameter value. Gah. At least now I have my SWFs printing like they should.

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Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Text Layout Framework

Wednesday, July 15, 2009    2 Comments

Adobe Labs has been producing weekly builds of their Text Layout Framework (making them available on Fridays), allowing for sophisticated and innovative typography within Flash.

I can remember years and years of developers and designer bitching about the lack of support for RTL, etc. and I am wondering if any are actually involved in flushing some of this functionality into their projects or work?

There is even a component available to work within Flash CS4 to aid in the setup of Text Layout Framework utilization.

If you forgot about this stuff, head on over.

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Sunday, July 12, 2009

FlashDevelop 3.0.2 RTM Released

Sunday, July 12, 2009    0 Comments

FlashDevelop 3.0.2 RTM released
This release fixes issues found after 3.0.1. We added few options and fixed some issues in the completion and the UI. Enjoy!

About FlashDevelop:

* Features
* Screenshots

Note to customizers:

This release is fully compatible with RC2 - 3.0.1 RTM.

List of changes:

* Find and replace regex engine fixed
* TraceManager now resist message flooding
* Start Menu group creation is now optional
* Script errors are now ignored by the browser control
* Completion now shows local "Class" vars after new keyword
* Option added to generarate code always with access modifiers
* Option added to disable haXe compiler based completion
* Option added to disable the find text updating on F3
* Other small completion and UI bug fixes

Future plans:

* Finish the one of the debuggers, investigate profiling.
* Implement class imports reorganisation and packages refactoring.
* Add HTML/JS projects, investigate Jangaroo AS to JS compilation.
* Evaluate the possible cross-platform implementation.
* Make the MXML completion actually smart.

Important:

* Get the debug Flash Player (You need: Projector and ActiveX)
* Get Adobe Flex 3 SDK. The free Flex SDK (2 or 3) is required for ActionScript 3 development if you don't use Flash CS3.
* Java 1.6+ is required for the Flex compiler (ActionScript 3).

:!: If you think the program is good, please donate some money for this project. :!:

Download:

Built from rev. 612
Download FlashDevelop 3.0.2 RTM

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Friday, December 5, 2008

Free Cocoa framework for Flash implementation

Friday, December 5, 2008    0 Comments

Flash'In'App is a free Cocoa framework that lets you load and fully manage Adobe® Flash movies directly from your own applications for Mac OS X. Flash'In'App contains a set of classes, which provide any application with the abilities to play SWF files, manage their playback, communicate with them via External API, FSCommands or Variables, control external resources loading, and much more.

Flash'In'App classes enable your applications to interact with Flash Player.plugin and SWF files themselves.

Your users will need at least Mac OS X 10.4 or later and Flash Player 8 or newer to run applications that you develop with Flash'In'App. Note: transparency will only work correctly on Intel-based Macs (sorry, it's not our limitation, but Adobe's one).

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Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Number.fromCharCode

Wednesday, June 11, 2008    0 Comments

We've all been acquainted with String.fromCharCode in relationship to event.keyCode, but it also works with Number. Why would you want to do that?

Well, I am getting sets of keyboard inputs as keyCodes from a piece of hardware, and I build up an angle to use. A delimiter lets me know when to stop per each set.

In order to translate the keyCodes back to numbers for use in building up the angle to use, instead of using a method to translate the keyCodes to a Number to use, you can simply do something like this:

var code:Number = event.keyCode;
var n:Number = Number.fromCharCode( code );

And from this I build up an array, looking for a delimiter all the time, and when I get the delimiter, build the angle number and use it. Of course this fails if you are getting keyCodes that are out of range of 0-9, so you need to filter your keyCodes as they come in.

I haven't seen any public code (yet) that uses Number.fromCharCode yet, and for me it works perfectly, so I thought I'd throw this out there.

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Wednesday, May 28, 2008

"My media is rich" text effect

Wednesday, May 28, 2008    1 Comments

I'm a sucker for various types of string manipulations when presented in visually rich Flash sites/applications. If done right, they can really dress up something that might otherwise be a little boring.

A paragraph of text for instance, presented on the "my media is rich" website (coming soon™) is pretty interesting. Roll over the About Us or Contact Us links on the menu bar to see what I mean.

This is just as interesting as the standard typewriter effect or random text unscramble (train station display character flipping). Since I haven't seen this used yet before, it's a little fresh still. 

So I decided I'd like to code up a class that mimics this same treatment. You can see the effect below.


There are a few ways to accomplish the task. Mine runs a little slower by choice, but that's super easy to control. I am actually offsetting the effect line to line too, so the last line finishes a hair later than the rest.

This is a class that I could clean up and release, but I am guessing it's not all that hard to code up for yourself. It's really just about timers, some formatting and string manipulation.

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Evangeline Lilly in pixels

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Evangeline Lilly from Lost set to various states of pixel processing & mouse manipulation in 3D space. Just another older experiment that I had occupying drive space that I thought might be of interest to some.

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Friday, May 23, 2008

BitmapData pixillation fun

Friday, May 23, 2008    5 Comments



A BitmapData pixillation effect (well, it is working by using the same principle as stop motion video to produce the effect).

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Friday, July 6, 2007

Flash on the iPhone...

Friday, July 6, 2007    0 Comments

Okay, so here are rumors galore about the Flash Player coming to an iPhone sometime in the future. There are three things that I can see wrong with the player on the iPhone (and with some genius they could all be sorted).

  1. Battery life. Someone needs to make a player that isn't Flashlite, but consumes a lot less CPU to do its rendering - taking advantage of the hardware more. I am sure the iPhone does this on its own already with all the speedy transitions. Give that to the Flash Player, and that would be a big help.
  2. Edge sucks, so we'd have to worry a little about the size of most Flash content, how it gets cached and eats memory, and how it would perform on a slow connection (something most of us have simply forgotten about). A caching mechanism or something could possibly help.
  3. The iPhone gesturing might get confused with Flash content underneath it that also sucks up mouse events? Probably not, but maybe. Depending on how the Flash was developed, it could make things weird, especially for full-screen Flash apps and websites. This is probably the easiest thing to fix.

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