Development tidbits, struggles, revelations, and still some Flash

Realized I was still using WP 2.1 (wow!!).. time to upgrade.

[edit] – Updated my theme while I was at it.

If you are in Las Vegas on December 8th, please join us for our holiday user group meeting. Lee Brimelow, Adobe Platform Evangelist, will be in town and presenting to our group. He’ll be showing off the new features of Flash CS4 and Flash Player 10. I’ve watched a lot of Lee’s video tutorials over the years and recently got a chance to talk to him at Adobe MAX.  We are in for a real treat.

December is also our big user group raffle. We’ve got Adobe swag and software to raffle off.  We’re also going to be collecting canned and other non-perishable food to donate to a local charity. You can earn extra raffle tickets for each can of food you bring.

See ya on the 8th.

Seems that if the FLVPlayback component in Flash CS3 (AS3)Â is currently playing a FLV and the timeline changes to a frame without a FLV component, without stopping the movie first, that the stream continues.

To reproduce: Set up a Flash CS3/AS3 file. Create a FLVPlayback component on one frame (only one frame), set up a source (via AS3 or via component parameters) and create a few blank frames. Add navigation buttons that exist on all frames and add event listeners for the buttons so you can jump between the frames. Run the movie and navigate to the frame with the FLVPlayback on it, and then navigate away. The audio continues but the component instance is gone.

What I found very interesting is that I could trace the instane name of the removed component afterwards, but if I tried to gain a reference to it via getChildByName, it came back null.   I also found that after adding stop (within a try catch), that it would work when going backwards on the timeline, but not forwards. And then if I jumped ahead and came back, that I could create overlapping audio. Very very weird.

Download Sample file. Run the sample file and navigate around — you’ll see some very odd behavior.

Now, the easy answer is “just don’t build it that way” or numerous other workarounds & fixes, but reality is that a number of beginning users are used to using frames/frame labels and it is would make sense to only have the component on the frame you needed it. My question is –> Whats really going on behind the scenes? (I have a few ideas).

Kudos to my Flash Level 2 students. They are great at finding bugs in documentation and components.

Note for future reference: To clean up your Workspace list in Flex Builder, edit org.eclipse.ui.ide.prefs and remove the old workspaces.

You can find this in Documents/Flex Builder 3/configuration/.settings (Mac) or My Documents\Flex Builder 3\configuration\.settings (Windows). Thanks to the archived FlexCoders list for the answer. Google was no help on this one.

Dear Adobe – I’d sure love to be able to name my workspaces instead of choosing them by their directory location.  Looking at a bunch of directory listings when switching Workspaces is not all that user friendly.

Has anyone been able to get AMFEXT for OSX?   I read a few posts regarding AMFEXT on OSX, but it didnt help out too much.

AMFEXT is a PHP extension written in C that implements encoding and decoding of AMF and AMF3 messages for the PHP language. It has been based on some of the experience gained with AMFPP, a native code for encoding and decoding C. The native encoding and decoding is extremely fast and memory efficient respect existing PHP implementation, and the flexibility has been provided using callbacks to the PHP code.