gStartPage is an extension for the gProject Panel. It gives you quick access to your gProjects and lets you select a project without having to open a blank document first. Clicking a gProject selects the project in the gProject panel and opens the anchor FLA in flash. If the panel is not open, the anchor file will still open, and the project will be selected when you open the panel manually.
The main application of this extension is that flash provides no way of opening a panel if there isnât an open document. This becomes pretty annoying if you just want to just open your project and get started. We originally started building this for our in-house use, but after a gProject user requested such an update, we decided to add in the default behaviors, and release it to everyone 🙂
The gStartPage does everything that the original Start Page does, but with a few extra features. As you can see we added the âopen a gProjectâ column to the start page, as well as an RSS aggregator to the bottom. We had originally decided to cut the height and whitespace of the Start Page down, but found that on mac computers the Start Page opens in a panel with a preset size, so we were left with a bunch of white space at the bottom. Rather than space it out, we decided to utilize the space.
So who needs the gStartPage?
I would say that if you have gProject this is a must. If you don’t, then you may want it just for the aggregator, which is customizable if you poke around your configuration folder 😉 gStartPage is available for Flash 7.2 and 8.
For those interested in this flash extension you can download it here(right click save as)
ciao
UPDATE
Per the comments below, Flash 7 on the Mac shows the recent files as full paths. Originally, we thought this might be due to a lack of testing on our part, however I have confirmed that the JSFL array “fl.mruRecentFileList” returns paths differently in Flash 8 than it did for Flash 7 (Mac only) — It seems that in Flash 8, the paths are equivalent to the PC version, which returns a URI (path/to/file), whereas Flash 7 uses the Mac path (path:to:file).
We will fix this and post and update. And thanks guy for directing our attention to the aggregator issue. It should be fixed as well.
Wow nice work dude, Whats next gFlash> lol
:o) Cam
Nice idea, but i broke it already, the feed reader only displays MXNA even though there are four feed url’s in the StartPageFeeds.xml file and also it kind of budged up:
http://www.flashguru.co.uk/downloads/gProject.broken.gif
In case anyone else wants to know how to hack their own start page…
http://www.bit-101.com/blog/archives/000036.html
http://www.bit-101.com/blog/archives/000037.html
Why does everything start with g?
Does the ‘open recent item’ list really need to display the whole path to the files I opened?
Some of the text in the RSS bit don’t render right (look blurry).
And it seems that the feeds aren’t being unescaped properly.
Sorry, but I am gonna revert or make my own (glad I backed up the original one).
Nice idea though.
15″ Powerbook, Tiger
Forgot to mention:
Clean install of Tiger & a fresh install of Flash 8. No MX2K4 or gProject (but buggyness of this makes me think what that’ll be like & $35 is to much to chance)
I also agree – drop the ‘g’ – sux
We can look into these bugs and release a patched version. Don’t forget that this is a free extension, whereas gProject had a budget.
If you aren’t happy with the extension, feel free to restore the original, which is in the install directory of Flash. We’ll post an update when we resolve the bugs.
As Lanny mentioned, this was a “for fun”, free project that was developed largely as a learning experience for some of our new staff, and because we thought it would be useful for us and other gProject users. It saw very little internal QA, and even less testing on the Mac (because I’m the Mac guy in the office, and was away until today). It is not a reflection on the quality of gProject at all, which has been tested and used extensively, saw formal QA, and was developed by more senior team members.
Regarding the “g” – I’ve been doing that as a way to avoid inventing real names for years, and it’s kind of stuck. I suppose we could come up with some catchy name like “ProjoTechnica” or something, but the “g” names say what the product does and brands it. It must be decent, because Google and Apple (though with the “i”) are both copying me. 😉
We have gotten away from the g names for most of our simpler pieces (individual classes and such).
Cheers.
PS. Just looked back at some of my oldest archives, and I’ve been doing the “g” prefix thing to some extent at least since my HyperCard days (>12 years).
Great stuff, thx!
a
I like this site!