FlashApe

If you’re not using Charles, the awesome HTTP Proxy that lets you monitor your network traffic, you really should check it out. For me it’s a must-have…the amount of time I saved debugging with it is ridiculous.

I just found out another totally awesome feature too..you can map remote directories to local directories. So say if you have a remote directory of www.blah.com/flash, you can tell charles to point that /flash directory to any directory on your local drive. Sweet!

Just finished reading the article “The Charges Against ActionScript 3.0″ by Colin Moock. Interesting read, for sure. It echoes the same sentiments that I’ve been hearing from a few others lately…flash development is getting too cumbersome. I’ve heard way more groans along the lines of “it sucks that I have to learn actionscript to do the most basic things in flash anymore” as opposed to “I love AS3!”. I think AS3 is great, but what drew me into Flash in the first place was how much I could get done quickly and easily, and that’s certainly not the case anymore, being too far removed from it’s point-and-click roots (the examples pointed out in the article sum this up perfectly).

Flex came about to get the “hardcore” developers, or at least the people who preferred to go the all-code route, their own separate workspace. However, many of the flash developers I know still have no interest in learning Flex. Hopefully Adobe will refocus on Flash IDE-centered development and rekindle that excitement of the earlier Flash releases.

…about google searching swfs. In my post yesterday I said I was skeptical, and looks like I was correct in my reasoning. Looks like I completely overlooked one major point of the announcement:

2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.

Which means, most external content not included. If you have an xml file, it will index the xml file separately, but if you’re loading your data from a database, looks like your out of luck. Even if you use a shim swf to load your main swf, your content won’t be indexed properly.

In all actuality, it isn’t that hard to make your full flash sites search-engine friendly, using any one of a number of different methods. Sure, there’s some extra steps you need to take but most of the time it’s not a crazy amount of work that pays off well.

It’s great to see Google and Adobe actively working on a solution, but the way they’re going about feels like a dead end, unless they figure out a way to really index the site how the user sees it (which in most cases isn’t what’s going to happen with their ‘new’ setup). Maybe we need a way to specify a ’search engine state’ inside the swf, and google can snapshot whatever if on stage at the moment (yes, i can see potential for abuse there, just trying to offer some suggestions). For now, like I said previously, I’ll just keep doing what I’ve been doing for flash seo.

I woke up inside the echo chamber this morning with 1800 blog posts and news stories about google now being able to search swfs. My first reaction was a big yawwwn, I stopped putting my content in swfs almost a decade ago. Reading more about what’s going on, I see that they’ve developed a custom version of the flash player that can view the site as a regular person would. Sounds cool, but I’m seriously skeptical. Part of me thinks maybe this is one of the big payoffs from the acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe (having Adobe throw it’s weight around), but mostly I just think it’s not going to work and I’m going to have to keep doing what I’ve been doing for flash seo…hoping for the best though.

Yeeaahhh!! Just got word that Jack Doyle is getting to release an AS3 version of his awesome Transform Manager. The AS2 version rocks, and I’ve ben waiting for this one for a while. You can see a beta of the tool at http://www.greensock.com/ActionScript/TransformManager/AS3/. Between this, and his awesome work with the various TweenLite classes, the amount he is asking to join his ‘Club Greensock’ is probably one of the best bargains I’ve seen.

Recently I posted about an issue about Flash CS3 components, wmode=transparent, and Event.RENDER, and in that post mentioned the UIComponent hack. One problem I did run into after using that hack was with custom CellRenderers, they didn’t work properly when loaded into another swf (when the parent swf exported it’s own CellRenderer). The fix was simple enough though: I just commented out the stage.invalidate(); line in callLaterDispatcher() and the loaded CellRenderer worked fine again.

Update: I’m going to have to call myself on this one…I must have done something screwy during my testing, because when I went back to it, I couldn’t get it to work. I wound up having to add the custom cell renderer from the child swf into the parent swf, which is reeeaaaal dirty but it’ll have to do for now.

Generally while working on a project in Flex Builder, when you run your app it generates a debuggable swf and outputs it to the bin-debug folder. Note that this is not the ‘final’ or ‘live’ version that you deploy as your app…it’s bloated with debugging code and such. For that you need to select Project > Export Release Build…, and (by default) it will create a bin-release directory which contains the final output files to deploy the app.

Hot on the heels of my last flash development issue craziness comes this doozy: In Internet Explorer, if you redirect a request to a swf to another file, and add new request parameters in the redirect, IE will not pass the new parameters to the final object…it will only pass the original query params.

For example: You want myserver.com/somepath?var=1 to redirect to myserver.com/mySwfFile.swf?differentVar=2, the swf will be loaded into the page receiving the parameters of var=1… and not differentVar=2.

Quite painful if you want to redirect older existing content to newer content. Of course, this works seamlessly in Firefox and Safari.

Someone put together an AS3Wrapper for Javascript, to enable you to code in AS3 syntax while writing javascript code. It claims to support the Full Flash API. That is probably the one thing that might interest me in writing any sort of javascript

If you see at that title and know what I am talking about, then you know my pain. Almost 2 days of work down the drain trying to figure out why the project I was working on worked fine in 9.0.115, but not any version earlier than that in Firefox and Safari.

Long story short, I stumbled across this tech note :

The plugin version of Flash Player does not fire flash.events.Event.RENDER when wmode is set as transparent. (198515)

which led me to this post from Jesse Warden about fixing the CS3 components. Made the changes he spoke of in the article (except I didn’t delete the component shim, i just added a new fl.core.UIComponent to my class path) and everything worked fine again. Joy.