Peter Elst

Geoff from fullasagoog was kind enough to put a crossdomain policy file on his server which allows us to connect to his public webservice using the WebServiceConnector component in Flash MX 2004 Professional.

I did a quick example using the UI components and databinding, it’s really quite cool … you can whip up little apps like this in under five minutes. The example connects to the webservice, fills the ComboBox component with all blogs that fullasagoog aggregates and gives the description for the selected item. Nothing fancy to it, in fact the only line of code I needed to type was: myWebservice.trigger();

After reading Mike Chambers’ post on executing JSFL files from the command line I decided to do some experiments.

Building on that concept I came up with a little script that opens up an FLA, adds some ActionScript and exports it. You can download the files here (be sure to change the path in the JSFL file to point to the correct locations of your FLA and SWF).

publishFLA.jsfl

fl.openDocument(”file:///C:/publishFLA.fla”);
var myDoc_doc = fl.getDocumentDOM();
var myTimeline_tl = myDoc_doc.getTimeline();
var myFrame_frame = myTimeline_tl.layers[0].frames[myTimeline_tl.currentFrame];
myFrame_frame.actionScript = “jsfl_txt.text =”This text was added through JSFL!”;”;
myDoc_doc.exportSWF(”file:///C:/publishFLA.swf”,true);
myDoc_doc.close(false);

Nothing very fancy in itself, but ofcourse the potential is practically limitless. Imagine creating new SWF files on the fly through a dynamically generated JSFL script. I’m very excited about those developments which may - who knows - even pave the way for a form of Flash Markup Language.

Hope to have more examples up in a little while!

Flashtival 2003 is rapidly approaching! This third edition of the largest Dutch-speaking Flash conference will prove to be a real winner with a keynote by Waldo Smeets and no less than 15 sessions mainly focussing on the new Flash release divided into three tracks. I’ll be doing a presentation on UI Components in Flash MX 2004 so if you’re going to attend and want to meet up be sure to drop me a line. All this on the 25th of September at the RAI in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

More information on: http://www.flashtival.nl

[Update] Flashtival 2003 was a great event, really enjoyed myself and met some really nice people! I’ve made my session notes available for download (sorry, they’re in Dutch only). Feel free to drop me a line if you attended my session, would love to get some feedback on it!

You’ve probably all read about the great new extensibility features in Flash MX 2004. We’ve got Timeline effects, Tools, Behaviours but my personal favourite is - believe it or not - Commands.

Commands are basically little (or not so little) scripts written in JSFL that perform a sequence of task in the authoring environment. You can choose to code your commands by hand and drop them in the “Commands” folder or simply select the steps you want to reproduce from the History Panel and save those to a Command. Once you’ve done that your script is available from the Commands menu of the toolbar and can be run

It’s that easy, I bet even your grandmother could do it! I can’t tell you how things like that can influence your workflow.

I’ll share with you the very first command I created “prepareLayers.jsfl. What it does is add two layers to the timeline, one for actionscript one for frame labels and lock them. This is something I would typically do every time I created a new FLA.

I became quite proficient at doing so, it would usually take me just under 10 seconds to add these layers, change the layer name and lock them. Now I’m down to 3 seconds, Commands > prepareLayers … talk about increased performance!

If you’re interested in Flash MX Components and want to support my site feel free to follow to link and buy yourself a copy of “Flash MX Components Most Wanted“.

I was lucky enough to co-author this book with a lot of very talented Flash developers (Aral Balkan, Josh Dura, Todd Yard, … to name but a few). Check out chapter 21 for my StringThing component contribution.

The book comes with no less than 21 components each with an accompanying chapter with a detailed description and various examples. A great buy if you’re looking for some Flash MX components to play around with!

I’ve written this SHA1 class in PHP quite a while ago but thought I might just put it up in case anyone’s still interested in using it.

The code was ported from Branden Hall’s SHA1 Secure Hash for Flash MX which in turn was based on a JavaScript implementation. You can download the code here, feel free to drop me a line if you’re using it for a particular project that’s always nice to know!

FYI, people running a PHP release above 4.3 can use the built-in sha1() and sha1_file() functions.

It’s been a few months now since I became a Team Macromedia volunteer for Flash. I just noticed my name got published on the site so I guess it’s about time to make a public announcement

Thanks to Billy Ray and Amy Brooks for their wonderful help!

I’ll be flying over to London on Friday where I’ll be speaking at the MMUG relaunch event.

It promises to be an incredible occasion, with no less than 6 speakers lined up including Peter Hall, Aral Balkan, Owen van Dijk, … this definately won’t be like any MMUG meeting you’ve seen before.

Best of all it’s free of charge and there are lots of prizes to be won! Don’t miss this opportunity and register now to avoid paying an entrance fee of £5.

This is it, I’ve finally set up my very own blog! Over the next few days and weeks you can expect quite a bit of posts on the new Flash MX 2004 features so stay tuned for that.