Posts
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Another simple JSFL Command
These things are just too simple and too useful. I love JSFL.
I make a lot of components. In recent posts you can see some of the trouble that can occur when you have assets set to export on first frame while building components. So I have a lot of files that have a lot of components that have a lot of assets.
Previous method:
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Open up Library. Select item. Right click, choose Properties or Linkage. Check if item is set to export on first frame. If so, uncheck it. Move to next item. -
Obligatory Flash Forward Post
I will be heading to NY to check in with the Flash Forward crowd, but not til Friday. I won’t actually be attending any sessions, just hooking up with some people and collecting a few owed pints. If you think you might owe me a pint, or perhaps I owe you one, get in touch and we’ll settle the score Friday night.
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Want to help on a very cool open source project?
Last week I posted a [Library Manager Extension][1] I was working on. As I got into improving it, I saw that there was a whole lot you could do with it. There are so many properties and methods of the Library and Item objects. The problem was that from a WindowSWF, you have to make these repeated calls to MMExecute, passing in strings that represent JSFL statements. It gets really complex when you are trying to pass in string or other variable types as arguments. I constantly got baffled with my single quotes, double quotes, escaped quotes, escaped escapes…blah!
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I'm a New Master, apparently.
Coming soon…
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New Masters of Flash and Photoshop. -
First Frame Export and Components
Talking to some folks about problems in making components and learned a few things. Here’s something you may not know. I didn’t.
When you export a component as a SWC, any and all symbols in that fla’s library that are set to export first frame will be included in that SWC – even if they are not included in the component symbol as assets or ever used by the component at all.
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Two really cool things about gmail
- I just got a gmail account! woohoo! bit101@gmail.com
- If I type “gmail” into Firefox, it searches Google, picks up the top result (gmail.google.com) and displays it instantly, grabs my cookies and logs me right in. How cool is that?
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Scope in AS2 Classes revisited, again.
A while back I did a post or two on handling scope issues in AS2 classes. (This is still something that constantly comes up on Flashcoders, etc.)
To recap, say you have a class, and you create an XML object and load in some XML. you set the onLoad handler of the XML object so that you know when it’s done loading (or not).
class MyClass { function getXML(){ var myXML:XML = new XML(); myXML.onLoad = function(){ trace(this); } myXML.load("some.xml"); } }OK, good enough. But once you’ve loaded and parsed the xml, you probably want to use it somehow in your class. But, from within the xml onLoad handler, there is no reference back to the class! _parent doesn’t work, as that’s a MovieClip property. You could try giving the xml object a property like “owner”, and referencing it in the onLoad handler as this.owner, but the XML object is not dynamic, so you can’t just add properties to it like that.
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Library Manager Extension
I’ve been wanting to do this Flash extension for a while.
Here’s the deal: say you are doing some work on your library. You want to export a bunch of items, or un-export them, or change their names or linkage names or first frame export status or class name. You have to go to right-click on each item and select properties, make the change, save it, move on to the next item, etc. Even if you don’t want to change anything, say you just want to see which items are exported on first frame, or what classes they have. You still have to do it one my one.
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Filling the Browser with Flash in Firefox
Sometimes you need to have a full browser screen filled with a swf. Everyone knows how to do that. You go into Publish Settings, set Dimensions to “Percent” and Width and Height to 100.
The problem is that you still end up with a margin around the edge of the page. So you dive into the HTML and add in something to change the margin and padding to 0 for the body.
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Electric Sheep – Best Screensaver Ever
I ran across this a week or so ago. www.electricsheep.org.
Not only is it one of the most visually stunning screensavers I've seen, but it's a pretty cool concept. When the screensaver activates, it downloads the latest designs, or "sheep", from the server. It also joins in the collective computation of new sheep. A new sheep is created every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, so there is always something new happening on your screen.
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