FlashGuru Blog

David Doull designer of the online house planner application - Small Blue Printer has added a new article to his site which explores the usefulness of components and how they change the model of flash application development. An interesting read, have a gander for yourself.

Mesh On MX regularly reports on new content that Macromedia add to the Designer & Developer section at their mammoth of a site. Today is yet another of those days, go and wear your eyes out, read the new usability oriented articles! The new articles are nicely listed here.

Somebody approached me today asking me if they knew of a way to specify a flash equivalent of the BASE html tag, that changes the base directory location for all of the swf’s relative external calls, such as Movieclip.loadMovie, Movieclip.loadVariables, loadMovieNum, XML.load, getURL etc…. I knew that one existed but i wasnt quite sure what it was called, luckily a Macromedia Technote on this subject saved the day…
(more…)

Macromedia announced today yet another wireless device that can play swf files. The Toshiba Genio is currently only available in Japan, but maybe we will see it in our stores sometime later in the year. This news really does go to show how much the Flash Player really is penetrating the Wireless market, i really cant see SVG catching up, ever at this rate!! Thanks goes to John Dowel for this article. Also remember that the newly released Flash Enabled book has the full lowdown on development for wireless devices such as this.

One set of rules, one dedicated flash community member, one prize and a bunch of competitors are the ingredients for this fun and well organised actionscript contest. Why not have a go yourself and put yourself in with a chance of recieveing a cd-rom jam packed full of actionscript experiments to learn from and gain inspiration from? Entries will be accepted until the end of May, so not long now before the closing date. Checkout the official website for this contest to find out the rules and see some of the submitted entries so far. Before you ask, im working on my entry now.

Macromedia have launched a new section on their already massive website, for those developers amongst us that are playing with Flash on Interactive Television, the Macromedia iTV Resource Center. The Flash Player now runs on three Interactive Televion boxes, Liberate, MSTV and OpenTV aswell as two home entertainment centers, the MOXI Media Center and the Nokia MediaTerminal. Currently the site is a little bear of content, only a Content Development Kit available for download, an FAQ to read and a linkage page. It will fill out eventually.

This function is used internally by the Macromedia Answers Panel as part of the update process. This function is used to save a local copy of a .swf file or a local textfile. This function is exactly the same as the undocumented Flash 5 function, dashboardSave. It can only be used within the Macromedia Authoring Environment, therefore it can only be used in .swf files that are going to be displayed inside of a panel in the authoring environment. With this function exposed, we can now create things such as self updating custom component user interfaces…
(more…)

Good news for the Flash Cartoon animators, Toon Boom Studio, the cartoon animation tool for Flash has an upgrade, version 2 is released. All new packages have new features, Toon Boom Studio 2 is no different, the main new exciting features are the ability to copy and paste motion point properties, paint vector shapes with bitmap textures, and support for sound streaming has been added. For a full list of features checkout this page. Toon Boom Studio 2 is only available for Windows at a feasible but quite expensive $349 and if you have a previous version of the product, namely Toon Boom Studio 1, you can upgrade to the latest version for $99. Thanks to Actionscript.com.

A new flash blog has arisen and joined the ranks of daily checking. Robert Hall author of chapters in two new Flash MX Books, Flash MX Magic and Flash Enabled shares his flash experience and knowledge with his readers. Check it out.

This function is used internally during the initializion stage for the predefined actionscript objects. It is used to hide an objects children from the for..in loop construct. The for..in loop construct iterates over all children of an object, this means it exposes both methods and properties of an object. It is also used to protect the predefined actionscript objects children from being over-written by another action with the same name and to protect the predefined actionscript objects from being deleted. The usefulness of this function can also be harnessed by the developer and that is when this function gets interesting…
(more…)

All movieclips automatically subscribe to amongst other objects, the Key objects event notifications, this means that you can define any of the Key event handlers within your movieclip, without having to explicitly subscribe to the Key objects, event notifications using the Key.addListener(mymovieclip) method…
(more…)

To keep FlashGuru’s MX 101, the first place to come for your Flash MX news, it needs to be updated regularly and it needs to have a keen eye in the community to get the Flash MX related news, first! It is hardwork and takes up alot of my time, therefore i would like to ask for ‘more’ news authors with a foothold in the community in some shape or form, to post regular articles, tutorials and reviews related to Flash MX. If you are interested in becoming a news author and you think you could be a dedicated contributor, then please drop me a line. ‘Everybody’ will be considered.

Swiff-Shrinker makes it “Drag and drop” simple to perform unique operations such as Compressing your old Flash 3, 4 & 5 SWF’s, reducing the filesize by up to 50%, Reducing the size of SWF’s output from other tools like Swish and Flix
Making your vector graphics even smaller with Swiff-shrinker’s unique “vector cleanup” and Batch processing, compress all the SWF’s on your hard drive in a matter of minutes! Ive been waiting for this product for sometime, from another company but it looks like somebody has beat them to it. Checkout the Swiff Shrinker website to purchase this worthy addition to your toolbox and find out more information.

Microsoft have ported and released the Flash 5 Player for the Pocket PC 2002. Developers have been waiting for the Flash 5 Player on wireless devices for quite a while now, and they are slowly but surely appearing. Flash 5 is so much more powerful than Flash 4. Ive had alot of first hand experience developing for the Flash 4 Player and know how much of a nightmare it can be. Im sure this news is a relief to alot of developers including myself. You can download it here. The Macromedia Flash Player for Pocket PC support site has not yet been updated, so keep checking back their for more help and information. Courtesy of Mesh On MX

This undocumented object is the core of the new Flash MX Event Model. It is used internally to control subscriptions to the predefined objects event notifications, unsubscribe from the predefined objects event notifications and to broadcast event notifications to all subscribed objects for each predefined object. This object can also be used for your own devices and that is when this object really becomes useful…
(more…)

I have decided to allow members of FlashGuru’s MX 101 to include HTML in their comments. This will hopefully provide a better experience for the viewers of this site, with simple advantages such as clickable links in comments, highlighted code in comments aswell as well formatted text, easy to read and digest…
(more…)

Textpad another of the popular text editors have just added a new Flash MX Actionscript syntax definition to their add-ons section on the website. If you primarily use Textpad, why not code all your actionscript in their too? Download the syntax definition file here.