Category / Flash

by Grant Skinner

gProject Version 1.3 Released

We have just completed and released version 1.3 of our alternative project panel for the Flash authoring environment. gProject 1.3 adds significant new features requested by our user base, including:

  • Locations: add directories to your project that do not reside within your main project directory. This can be done globally (for all projects), or per project. Locations will be displayed at the top of the file browser with a new blue folder icon. Network locations display with a variation of the blue icon.
  • Network support: gProject now has full support for projects and locations that are on networks.
  • Quick Project: this feature lets you create a new temporary project based on the front-most FLA. Great for times when you want to quickly take advantage of file browsing or standardized class creation without a permanent project. Quick projects have all of the features of full projects, and can be easily converted into a permanent project.
  • Class path enhancements: the panel now supports new options for specifying class paths, including relative (ex. ../src/classes) and absolute paths. Regardless of the class path location, the classes directory will be aliased at the top of the file browser with a new green directory icon.
  • Organize Library: Added a new utility menu item that will organize your FLA’s library based on linkages.

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by Lanny McNie

Refreshing Panels in Flash 8

Here at gskinner.com, we do a lot of panel development. For speedier development, we set the publish settings to spit the swf directly into the “Flash MX 2004/en/Configuration/WindowSWF/”directory. This way, once the panel was published once, you didn’t need to move any files, or even leave the IDE — you could simply close and open the panel.

One of the biggest panel development gotchas in Flash MX 2004, was that in order to refresh a panel, you needed to click the “close” button, and not use the right-click/close panel method. Using the latter would keep the panel open in memory, and not reflect changes when it opened.

When Flash 8 dropped, we were excited about the smarter custom swf panels, which detect changes in the swf, and refreshed only when changes were made. This means that no matter how you close the swf, it will not reload unless changes are made. That in itself is great, but a bug in Flash 8 refreshes only the graphics in updated swfs, and not the external classes. This made panel development in Flash 8 impossible. Until today, we had been doing most panel work in MX04, and in the cases where we need to use Flash 8, multiple restarts were necessary.

The solution?

Dock/undock the panel.

We found this totally by accident, but it works! This is the only way to completely refresh the panel, code and all in Flash 8.

by Grant Skinner

FlashForward Finalist for Experimental

It’s been a good day! First my FWA interview was released, and I now I just learned that Gallery Incomplet [Note: Moved to incomplet.gskinner.com] is a finalist in the FlashForward Film Festival. Click on over and check out the amazing sites that are up for awards, and get some inspiration.

I will be giving a talk at FlashForward titled “Digital Art and Alternative Interactions” that deals with a lot of the philosophies, techniques and code that went into incomplet. I’ll also be discussing a lot of the technical aspects of the site at my London Flash 8 Bootcamp.

Update: I looked over the competition, and it’s going to be a tight race – some really nice work, each with a distinct flavour. I’ve judged the experimental category in the past a few times, and often been a bit disappointed by the field. I hope this is indicative of a resurgence of experimentation in the Flash world.

by Grant Skinner

Local Loading in AS3 for Macs

It would appear that the 8.5 player for Mac doesn’t support local loading in AS3 (at least for Sound, I haven’t tested other objects yet). This makes a certain amount of sense, being that there is no dev environment yet, so local testing isn’t really expected. However, if you’re using my context menu plug-in, or one of the various other options to compile AS3 on the Mac, you’ll probably want to be able to test without uploading to a server.

The solution is simple, but it took me a while to narrow down the potential approaches before I found one that worked. You simply have to test your SWF through the webserver built into OSX.

To do this, turn on “Personal Web Sharing” in the “Sharing” control panel, place the SWFs you want to test in the “~user/Sites/” directory, and access them via “http://localhost/~user/SWFName.swf” from your browser. To make this a little easier, I added a “flCompile and httpTest” context menu workflow to the flCompile package, and updated the Read Me with instructions to get it working. While I was at it, I also cleaned up the flCompile scripts a bit, and made it a little easier to change the command line params for things like background color and swf dimensions. You can download the new package from the original post on flCompile.

Also be sure to check out the comments on the original post for other options for compiling AS3 on OSX.

by Grant Skinner

Gallery Incomplet Updates for Dec

I’m going to keep a little log going on the blog to track what has been updated or added to Gallery Incomplet. [Note: Moved to incomplet.gskinner.com] This should help keep me motivated to continue updating it, and keep readers informed about my ongoing experimentation (because much of it won’t be blogged here on a real-time basis). Because of the holidays, I’m going to post the December log now.

Updates:

– Made the pod shadows dynamic based on y position (was previously always a 45 degree drop shadow)

– Added logic to track viewed items between visits using LSOs. Previously viewed items will now be displayed with a folded corner

– Minor updates to loading and transitions

Additions:

– Fluids. Playing with fluid simulation in a psuedo 3d environment.

– Clouds/Fog. Using multiple layers of perlin noise to simulate moving through clouds or fog.

– Transcendence. Building on clouds, transcend this mortal plane.

– LightningStrike. Dynamically generated lightning, thunder and lighting effects.

– ElectricJellyfish. Not quite sure where this is going, but it’s kind of neat.

Go to incomplet.org to view the Flash experiments. [Note: Moved to incomplet.gskinner.com]

by Grant Skinner

Easily Compile AS3 and Flex2 on Mac OSX

[UPDATED Jan 3, 2006: Added “flCompile and httpTest”, updated workflows to make it easier to customize command line parameters like swf dimension and background color]

There are a lot of things I want to play with in AS 3 and Flex 2, but there’s one problem: I’m using Mac OS X, and FlexBuilder 2 is only available for Windows right now. Fortunately, I stumbled upon this page via this blog entry by Robin Hilliard, which explains how to compile ActionScript 3 and Flex 2 on the Macintosh using the command line.

I’m a Mac user though! Commandlines are for lesser OSes! Refusing to stoop to typing arcane commands into the Terminal, I instead spent my evening learning to use Automator and the rather eccentric AppleScript language to build a solution. The result is a contextual menu plugin that will compile AS3 and Flex 2 MXML files, then open them in Safari for testing. It’s still a little rough around the edges, and it’s nowhere near as nice as working in FlexBuilder2, but it works! I also fleshed out the instructions for getting command line compiling working on the Mac.

You can download it by clicking here (10kb). It requires Mac OS X 10.4. Please read the ReadMe file – the contents of which follows:

Disclaimer

I take absolutely no responsibility for any problems you experience or damages (direct or indirect, including but not limited to loss of data) caused by using these workflows. I have tried my best to make sure they are totally safe, but I am not an AppleScript expert or a command line guru. Use at your own risk.

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