I don’t mind seeing the Firebug icon occasionally (like when the Firebug panel is open), but I find it a bit distracting and, yes, disturbing to have that little bug always onscreen. Oddly, I never found Safari’s “report bug” button distracting in the same way—perhaps it’s because the Safari bug icon is more abstract than the more finely detailed Firebug icon. (Although I admit that looking at these two screenshots side by side, there doesn’t seem to be much of an obvious difference!)

In any case, I decided to create my own status bar icon for the new Firebug. As you can see, my icons are very abstract, to get away from the creepy-crawliness of it all. The six legs are represented by six stubby horizontal lines, and the body has become a sphere.

(disabled) and (enabled)

If you want to install these alternate icons yourself, here is what you’ll need to do:

1. Download the Firebug 1.2 Beta XPI file from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843 (right-click [or CTRL-click on a Mac] on the “Install Now” button and choose “Save Link As…”)
2. Change the file’s .XPI extension to .ZIP
3. Extract the contents of the ZIP file into a new folder
4. Download the two icon files: firebug16.png and firebug-gray-16.png
5. Copy the two PNG files into the folder skin/classic. When prompted if you want to replace the existing files, say “Yes”
6. Zip the folder into a new archive (for example, you might call it firebug-1.2.0b3-myicons-fx.zip). Make sure that the directory hierarchy of the archive is the same as the original (i.e. the top level includes the files chrome.manifest, intall.rdf, etc)
7. Change the ZIP file’s extension to .XPI
8. In Firefox, open the Add-Ons window
9. Drag your customized XPI file from your Explorer/Finder window into the Add-Ons window
10. Click “Install” in the dialog box
11. Restart Firefox!

If all goes well, you will no longer have a creepy-crawly bug in your status bar

You see that little button I circled?

In Flash 8, that button would toggle the X, Y fields between displaying the coordinates of the selected object’s upper-left corner and its registration point. In Flash CS3, though, the button toggles between showing the object’s transformation point vs its registration point.

There seems to be no way to show the object’s upper-left corner coordinates any more!

Unfortunately this was a feature I used a lot. I could write down an object’s upper-left coordinates so that I could later restore its visual position on the stage even if I changed the symbol’s registration or transformation points. Those numbers are critical if I want to edit a symbol’s registration point without disturbing its visual placement on the stage.

The message is always on top, so it is impossible to draw over it. But what if we tried distracting the user from the actual security message?

Here’s a silly test:

Of course, you can press Esc (or alt+tab to another window) to escape.

UPDATE: I have made the source code available, warts and all, under a ZLib licence. Share and enjoy

That is:
If a movie is loaded with the URL:
movie.swf?a=initialValue

and the movie contains a script that does something like this:
_level0.a = "some other value"

the value of a will get reset to “initialValue” on every frame, until the movie finishes loading!

This is different than if you pass in the variable using flashVars. If you use flashVars, the variable stays set, as you would expect it to.

Here are some tests to demonstrate the behaviour. It’s best to clear your cache in between each test, or you will get varying results.

• Using query string variables
• Using flashVars

Here’s a screenshot from a test using query string variables:

The test movie is embedded with code that passes the variable “a” set to “from html“. The movie continually displays the value of the variable “a” in the scrolling text field. On the fourth frame, it changes the the value of a to “set from script.”

At any time, you can click on the “Set” button to set the variable to “set from script.” When the movie is finished loading (there’s a 700K JPEG file on the last frame to make the movie large and slow-loading), you can click the “Stop” button to stop the scrolling text field from updating.

Play with both tests, and compare the effects if you clear the cache between tests or not, and try clicking “Set” at different times.

UPDATE: This only seems to occur in movies published for Flash Player 8! Here’s a test using a movie published for Player 7 and variables passed via the query string:

• Using query string variables, Flash Player 7

And, of course, I have no idea how ActionScript 3/Flash Player 9 behaves in a similar situation…

Ha!

I missed this section: “You have SWFs that are exported for Flash Player 7 (SWF7) or earlier that communicate with the hosting HTML by any means”.

And when they say “any means,” that includes LoadVars.send(), which I am using, in a SWF that is hosted on a different subdomain than the page which contains it (petswf.bunnyherolabs.com vs bunnyherolabs.com).

Luckily, the fix was simple: I just had to add the parameter allowScriptAccess = "always" to the embed tag. Phew!

Next time I see one of these announcements, I promise I will test it, even if I don’t think it applies to me

Today I attended a session introducing Electrotank’s ElectroServer Universe Platform (they don’t have a section on their website for it yet, it’s that new!). It builds on their successful ElectroServer product, adding things like a high-performance isometric rendering engine, a world editor, and content management systems. It looks very advanced and quite impressive, and would probably give any developer wanting to create a virtual world a solid leg up. I will definitely investigate this platform further should I decide to extend bunnyhero labs in a more persistent-world direction.

Grant’s script uses a text file to specify what files need to be built and where the resulting SWFs should be copied. However, the text file uses single tab characters (ASCII 9) to separate the fields, and I like to configure my text editors to insert spaces instead of the tab character.

I made a small modification to Grant’s script to allow any amount of whitespace (spaces or tab characters) in between each field in the schema file.

I changed this (around line 49 in compileProject.jsfl):

    var l = schema.length;
    for (var i=0;i<l ;i++) {
        var row = schema[i].split(String.fromCharCode(9));

to

    var l = schema.length;
    var regExpDelimiter = new RegExp("[ \t]+");
    for (var i=0;i<l ;i++) {
        var row = schema[i].split(regExpDelimiter);

And that was that!

(I originally tried using the literal RegExp notation [e.g. scheme[i].split(/[ \t]+/)], but it didn’t seem to want to compile that way.)

]]> http://www.bunnyhero.org/2008/02/21/tweaking-gskinners-compileproject-script/feed/ http://www.bunnyhero.org/2008/01/31/welcome/ http://www.bunnyhero.org/2008/01/31/welcome/#comments Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:32:01 +0000 bunnyhero http://www.bunnyhero.org/2008/01/31/welcome/ A few days ago I received an email informing me that my blog had been accepted for inclusion in the MXNA feed! I’d almost forgotten I’d applied. This is both exciting and terrifying

For the record, I have not been posting very often, although I hope to rectify that. And now that I am on the feed, I will try to keep the blog as on-topic as possible.

Thanks to all out there who make the MXNA feed so useful to the Flash/Flex community, I will do my best to maintain that level of quality.

I did have to make a change from the original version, to conform to the new AIR HTML security model. My original code used setInterval, with a string to execute as the first parameter. This is a no-no in the new security model (since the executable string is the equivalent of an eval). I could have put the whole thing into an iframe in a non-application sandbox, but instead I used the AIR-native Timer class, which did the trick.

Download the updated Monster Attack! (requires Adobe AIR beta 3)