Development tidbits, struggles, revelations, and still some Flash

Below are the week 3 ActionScript class presentation and files.

Week 3 Presentation (in FlashPaper format)

Video Demos

Week 3 Files (zipped)

If you are in the Las Vegas area, be sure to come to the next LVMMUG meeting. Arrive early because I am sure the room will be packed.

Question & Answer Night! with 2 Macromedia Evangelists

This session offers something of interest for everyone in the Macromedia community. Bring any questions that you have about Macromedia products, from beginner to advanced, for Macromedia evangelists Greg Rewis and Tom Person to answer.

Greg Rewis is Macromedia’s Chief Web Technologies Evangelist. In this role, Greg is one of Macromedia’s primary spokespersons for the Macromedia web publishing suite of software and web application development servers. Dreamweaver, Contribute, Fireworks, Flash and all of Macromedia’s web technologies. Greg has mastered them all.

Tom Person is one of Macromedia’s Senior Web and e-Learning Evangelists. Tom can address questions related to on-line learning, content development (CBT, CD and wireless), integration with LMS (Learning Management Systems), and making content Accessible with W3C and 508 (U.S.) guidelines. Authorware, Breeze, Captivate, and all of Macromedia’s e-learning products. Tom has mastered them all.

Everyone with questions is encouraged to email their questions in advance of the meeting. To submit questions in advance, please send them to: info@lvmmug.org

Questions at the meeting are also welcome. And even if you have no questions, this is a unique opportunity to learn hints and tips about Macromedia’s products.

fyi … because this is a public meeting, Greg and Tom are not permitted to address questions about unreleased products. That is, they may only answer questions about the released products that we are currently using.

Greg and Tom will, however, be providing a demonstration of the next version of the FlashPlayer, code named Maelstrom!

- John O.

I bought the SlideShowPro component a few weeks ago for a quick client project I was working on. Yesterday, an iPhoto plugin was announced for quick generation of the thumbnails and xml. It is really really nice. I have both Mac and PC, but lately I tend to work mostly on my PC and I have Picasa installed. It is the iPhoto for the Windows world.

After playing with the iPhoto plugin, I started to wonder today if Picasa could do something like this. Sure enough, after a little searching, I can across the templates. An hour later, I had my first template for Picasa ready. Its not as nice as the iPhoto plugin, so if you have iPhoto, use that one!! ..but I hope to improve this one more soon.

If you use Picasa and the SlideShowPro component, here is the zip file.

To install it:

• Unzip the archive and copy the folder into your templates folder.
• Mine is located at : C:\Program Files\Picasa2\web\templates\

To use it:

• Launch Picasa
• Select the album you wish to export from the album listing on the left side of Picasa ( Sorry..only supports a single album )
• Right-click on the album and select “Make a Webpage…” from the contextual menu.
• On the following screen, select your large image size, the title of your album, and where you want to save it to, and then click “Next”
• Select the template you want to use: XML for SlideShowPro and then hit the “Finish” button.

This was a pretty quick “hack” on my part, but I hope to improve on it really soon.

I hope anyone who uses it, enjoys it. I haven’t tested it with Picasa 1.0 since I switched to Picasa 2.0 when it came out. If anyone tests it and can let me know that would be awesome.

- John

Screenweaver MX: Rest in Peace.

The note on the door says “closed” — actually it says “Support on the Screenweaver (3/MX) product has been discontinued. It is no longer available for download or for sale.“.

I used Screenweaver quite a bit a few years back when making some desktop Flash games for the company I worked for at the time. Screenweaver had a nice API (no fscommand) and it seemed like their product had a good amount of momentum behind it. It may have been coincidence but after FlashMX2004 came out, things started to go downhill. I remember checking their forums not long afterwards and reading problems with creating executables using Flash player v7 and company support seemed to taper off.

I wish the guys from Rubberduck all the best. It was a really good product when I used it.

Zinc v2 by MDM seems like they are still doing well, so I guess I’ll check their demo soon.

Tired of using trace and getting [object Object],[object Object],[object Object], etc and then having to write a recursive function to burrow down through the entire object. Jen deHaan (http://www.markme.com/dehaan/) posted up a really cool tidbit on using ObjectDumper.

Article: Hidden component goodness: ObjectDumper

Here’s the code sample from Jen’s blog, with additional info on the other parameters that can be used.

[as]
import mx.data.binding.ObjectDumper;

// create a sample associative array
var my_dp:Array = new Array({name:’Grissom, M.’, avg:0.279}, {name:’Bonds, B.’, avg:0.362}, {name:’Cruz, D.’, avg:0.292}, {name:’Snow, J.’, avg:0.327});

// trace using ObjectDumper.toString
// ObjectDumper.toString(obj, showFunctions:Boolean, showUndefined:Boolean, showXMLstructures:Boolean, maxLineLength:Number, indent:Number)

trace(ObjectDumper.toString(my_dp,false,true,false,80,0));

[/as]

Instead of tracing object Object, … you get a nicely formatted output of the entire object

[{avg: 0.279, name: "Grissom, M."},
{avg: 0.362, name: "Bonds, B."},
{avg: 0.292, name: "Cruz, D."},
{avg: 0.327, name: "Snow, J."}]

Very cool. Super thanks to Jen deHaan for blogging this.