http://www.bunnyhero.org Notes on Flash and Web development Tue, 24 Jun 2008 07:35:58 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Since I recently upgraded Firefox to version 3, I updated my Firebug install to version 1.2 Beta. One of the first things I noticed was that the little icon in the status bar had changed from a checkmark (or a grey slash when disabled) to the little insect icon (it's ... http://www.bunnyhero.org/2008/06/24/firebug-icons/ So I finally upgraded to Flash CS3, and I noticed something that has changed in the UI. 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, ... http://www.bunnyhero.org/2008/05/15/flash-cs3-and-the-case-of-the-missing-upper-left-coordinates/ When Flash Player 9 goes into full screen mode, it pops up a little security message that tells the user how to exit full screen mode. It appears as white text on a semi-transparent black background so it is generally always visible (which is good). Still, I wondered if it ... http://www.bunnyhero.org/2008/05/10/scaring-people-with-fullscreen/ I just discovered some strange behaviour in the Flash player if you try to change variables passed in through the query string before the movie has finished loading. 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 ... http://www.bunnyhero.org/2008/05/02/weird-query-string-variable-behaviour/ So here I was, thinking that the Flash Player 9 security update (version 9.0.124) wasn't going to affect me. A silly assumption, of course—I should have tested with the beta, regardless—but since I didn't do anything fancy with sockets or web services, I thought I would be fine. Ha! I missed this ... http://www.bunnyhero.org/2008/04/11/flash-player-9-april-2008-security-update-affects-me-too/ I am currently attending the Virtual Worlds conference in New York City. It's quite a fascinating conference, covering full-blown 3D worlds (a la Second Life), browser-based paper doll communities (Stardoll) and everything in between. Flash is well-represented here; if it's 2D or 2.5D virtual world (i.e. not a full 3D ... http://www.bunnyhero.org/2008/04/04/virtual-worlds/ Recently I had the need to rebuild a whole bunch of Flash movies, more than I wanted to do manually. Before writing my own JSFL script to automate the process, I did a quick Google search and found Grant Skinner's FLA Batch Compiler script. It's very flexible and very handy: ... http://www.bunnyhero.org/2008/02/21/tweaking-gskinners-compileproject-script/ 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 :P For the record, I have not been posting very often, although I hope to rectify that. And ... http://www.bunnyhero.org/2008/01/31/welcome/ No new features: just rebuilt and repackaged to run on AIR beta 3. Note that the newest AIR beta properly displays animated GIFs, which makes this silly app look much better :) I did have to make a change from the original version, to conform to the new AIR HTML security ... http://www.bunnyhero.org/2008/01/03/air-monster-attack-updated-to-latest-beta/ I haven't delved into this in detail (so it could simply be an error on my part), but I had a function that returns a string. The string is long and complex, so my return statement looked something like this: return 'string stuff' + ' ... http://www.bunnyhero.org/2007/11/09/weird-flash-8-compiler-bug/