FlashApe

Just had a 5.8 magnitutude earthquake here in Los Angeles. Nothing too hairy, not enough to cause any damage, but still enough to get everything shaking pretty well.

Just throwing this question out there to pick the brains of other Flex developers: Do you have any preferences/standards that you follow for your mxml formatting? Care to share? Here are the formats I seem to come across most:

Single line, common attributes grouped together and listed first:

Single line, with all attributes in alphabetical order:

Each attribute listed on a new line:

Personally, I don't have a standard yet. I usually go with tags on a single line, but the attribues are in no particular order at all, except in pairs where it make sense, like x & y always together. I do go with each attribute on a single line for the opening tag of a component or the main Application, though...seems to make more sense to do it there.

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.