Peter Elst

I’ve been doing tech review for the upcoming Friends of ED title “Extending Flash MX 2004″ by Keith Peters and Todd Yard.

This is definitely a book that you’ll want to have if you’re at all interested in extensibility features for Flash MX 2004: Commands, Timeline Effects, Tools, Behaviors, XML-to-UI, JSFL from the command line, … it’s all covered. This book also comes with an excellent JSFL reference section complete with examples.

You can pre-order this book now or check out the accompanying website: http://www.flashextensibility.com.

Kudos to Corné van Dooren for the great cover design!

Publications

I’ve just finished a publish template for Flash to use with the “insertFlash” generic JavaScript solution for the upcoming IE changes. You can download the file here, simply drop it in the First Run/HTML folder of your Flash install directory and restart Flash.

You can then specify the “IE Changes Workaround” publish template in the publish settings dialog (File > Publish Settings). The exported HTML requires the file insertFlash.js to be located in the same directory for the JavaScript Flash embed to work.

There has also been an update to “insertFlash” itself, it now supports setting the required Flash player version and align property by specifying the “version” and “align” properties in the params argument.

insertFlash(”mySWF.swf”,550,400,”#FFFFFF”,{menu:false,version:”7,0,0,0″,align:”right”});

[Update] The “insertFlash” JavaScript code was just updated due to a problem with not specifying a value for the version attribute.

Flash

I’m sure you’ve all heard and read a great deal about the changes that Microsoft will implement in its next browser release and the way in which it will influence the embedding of “Active Content” (Flash, Shockwave, Real, Windows Media, PDF, …).

For those that didn’t, I’ll give you a quick runthrough of what exactly is going on. Eolas sued Microsoft concerning a patent that involves the automatic launching of embedded Active Content in an HTML document. The court ruled in favour of Eolas and ordered Microsoft to pay for damages of the patent infringement. Needless to say Microsoft is appealing this judgement, the legal process for does however take considerable time and to limit its liability the company is working on a system that does not infringe the Eolas patent.

What Microsoft will be doing is displaying a message every time active content is loaded on your page, so for every embedded element you’ll get a prompt. There is currently a beta version of this IE6 browser update available on the MSDN site that will show you this behaviour.

Macromedia has actively been following this case ever since the ruling against Microsoft and is working on developing some open-source tools that help automate content updates for getting around this prompt for the upcoming IE browser release (expected early next year). It has even set up a Active Content Developer Center dedicated to the issue where they’ll be posting all information on solutions that are available to us.

The solution that up to know looks the most promising one for the average Flash developer is using external JavaScript to write the OBJECT and EMBED tag dynamically out to the browser.

Many people where complaining that with this solution they would have to create seperate .js file for every instance of active content on their site. Luckily that need not be the case!

I started working on a generic JavaScript function that you can call for all Flash content. The “insertFlash” function takes four arguments: swf, width, height, bgcolor and params. The first three arguments are required, the bgcolor argument simply reverts to a default color if it is not set. The final “params” argument takes an object and parses that to both PARAM child-tags for the OBJECT tag and attributes for the EMBED tag.

Here is a simple example of how you would use the insertFlash function:

insertFlash(”mySWF.swf”,550,400,”#FFFFFF”,{menu:false,wmode:”transparent”});

You can download the JavaScript function and an example HTML file here (2Kb). Please note that this is the first release, if you’re experiencing any problems with it please drop me a line!

Flash

Vera Fleischer has been working on some cool examples for using the WebServiceConnector component in Flash MX 2004 Pro (partly based on my earlier experiment with the fullasagoog webservice).

If you’re interested to learn more about how to do use this component in combination with data binding and the UI components be sure to check out her site!

Flash

Ultrashock has just launched its Flash MX 2004 tutorial series featuring no less than 8 in-depth articles by some leading Flash developers including Peter Hall, Dave Yang, Grant Skinner, …

This is without doubt the most comprehensive guide to the new Flash MX 2004 features available on the web to date. Be sure to check out my humble contribution “Skinning Flash MX 2004 components“.

Flash