Everyone and their mother will be blogging this, but for good reason – this is an important issue, and one we have to start addressing sooner rather than later.

Information on the changes to how Internet Explorer handles active content (like Flash and Shockwave) is now available at:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/ieupdate

http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/activecontent

It’s better than it could have been, but it’s still going to be a pain. Thanks Eolas! (who’s up for TPing their corporate offices?)

Macromedia has been very responsive to this issue, and should have utilities to help us transition smoothly available soon (good job MM!!). It will soon be our turn, as developers, to ensure the transition continues smoothly. It should be our collective goal to make sure that when the first browsers with this change hit consumers in early 2004, users are met with a minimum number of prompts – we really don’t need to give people a new reason to hate/disable Flash.

[EDIT:] Does anyone know the answer to this very important question:

Does anyone know if the new IE differentiates between disabling Active Content prompts, and disabling ALL Active Content? This one issue will have a huge impact on our industry.

Ultrashock has just posted a set of new tutorials on FlashMX 2004 from the likes of Dave Yang, Peter Hall and Philip Kerman. My own humble contribution leads you through building an MVC application using forms, without a single line of code in the FLA!

Very much worth checking out.

For whatever reason, it appears Macromedia shipped FlashMX04 with the classPath order mixed up. Thankfully, we can fix it – and I REALLY urge you to do so, right now!

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I’ve uploaded a new version of GDispatcher that fixes a small error in the code that was causing a compiler error.

You can download the new version here (1kb).

There should be a beta 2 release in the next day or so, as I mull through some major compatibility issues with the highly discombobulated UIEventDispatcher class. Some days I wonder if Command HQ doesn’t go out of its way to make things overly difficult for us guys in the trenches – the v2 component framework seems to be irrefutable proof of it

Ok, I have to post a bit of a retraction. While EventDispatcher is still a big improvement over previous event models, it’s not quite as cool as I thought it was at 3am last night. Nothing ever looks quite as hot the morning after, does it?

The ability to subscribe functions or methods to events is made vastly less useful than I excitedly thought last night by the fact that the function will, of course, be executed within the scope of the object dispatching the event (duh). This means that really, this approach is only about as useful as a callback event handler (the functionality is virtually identical) – its occasionally handy for quick’n’dirty prototyping, but usually not good form.

Ahh… the murky clarity of 3am experimentation. Oh well, stay tuned, I hope to build out an extended version of the eventDispatcher that includes some nifty new tricks.

This entry talks about using the private keyword to restrict access to members of a class. It should prove to be a fairly short topic, but there’s more coming in the days ahead.

This post will build on concepts from previous posts, so I would encourage you to have a look at the previous 5 entries before starting on this one.

Read on…
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In many respects, I haven’t been overly impressed with the F04 (Flash MX 2004) update, though I’m reserving my final opinion for a month or so, until I’ve really dug deeply into it. Tonight though, chatting with Phil Chung, I ran into something I’m really impressed by: eventDispatcher

I thought I’d should provide a run-down of it here, as it appears well thought out, and very flexible (though I’ll probably write an extension to it to fulfill my short wishlist of missing features). Whoever thought this one up at Macromedia should be proud.

Read on…
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Thanks to some wonderful multi-lingual Flashers, the Object Oriented Programming for Actionscript 2.0 series of posts is being translated into a plethora of languages. Currently, translations have begun in:

Korean

French

Latvian

Chinese

Spanish

Dutch

German

Brazillian Portuguese

Links should also be available to the individual translated articles in the comments section for each entry (I have asked each translator to provide these). If you find these translations valuable, please send the translators some encouragement in their comments, or by email. Thanks guys!

If you’re interested in doing a translation, just fire me an email with the “contact” button at the top of the page.

EDIT: added French, 2003/09/21

EDIT: added German, 2003/09/22

EDIT: added Brazillian Portuguese, 2003/09/23