Musings of a Manchester Drupal guy

Drupal, Open Source, Analytics, Social Media.

Thursday, July 29, 2004

Masking Dynamic Text and Device Fonts

Masking Dynamic Text and Device Fonts - You cannot use a layer masks when text areas are set to dynamic text. This is a tutorial explains how to get around this problem using the moviecliptomask.setMask( maskmoiveclipname ) action script.

Tuesday, July 27, 2004

Flash MX 2004 7.2 Releases

Macromedia - Flash : Flash MX 2004 7.2 Release Notes - Latest flash updater is here. Was someone listening to me yesterday at Macromedia? :) Features

  • Faster compiling on testing a movie. Certainly the case, maybe as much as 3x faster.
  • Better help and more code examples ... thankyou

Monday, July 26, 2004

Flashcomguru Forums

Flashcomguru Forums

Flash Team: New weblog from the Flash product team

Flash Team Weblog from the Flash product team. I have found compiling to be really slow and noticed that they claim this will be improved in the new version named Ellipsis.

Sunday, July 25, 2004

DevNet 8 Out

Macromedia: DevNet Resource Kit Volume 8 is available now.

ColdFusion MX Un-Documentation - undocumented features in ColdFusion MX

ColdFusion MX Un-Documentation - undocumented features in ColdFusion MX ... details several useful methods for the query object, component introspection and the string object.

Monday, July 19, 2004

Electric Rain - Swift 3D New Version out

Electric Rain - Swift 3D Examples ... simply amazing stuff!

Returning the url a flash movie is embedded on

Took me a while to discover this gem. I am writing a movie which will be licenced, with the licence tied to an individual web sites domain name. So I needed a way for teh flash moive to communicate back to the server (via web services) where it was sat.

The variable I was after is

_url

.... so simple.

trace(_url);

Sunday, July 18, 2004

Opening styled web browser popups from flash

Saw this on the www.flashmove.com forum. Thought it was pretty useful to know

_root.onMouseDown = function() {
var url = "http://www.flashmove.com";
var w = 700;
var h = 500;
getURL("javascript:NewWindow=window.open('" + url + "','newWin','width="+w+",height="+h+" ,left=0,top=0,toolbar=No,location=No,scrollbars=No
,status=No,resizable=No,fullscreen=No');void(0);");
};

Thursday, July 15, 2004

Flash Web Services and dataproviders tip

I have been playing with web services and components in Flash MX 2004. I discovered that if I do the following the data passed from the Cold Fusion web service is in a format Flash can treat as a dataprovider. Neat.

***Cold Fusion Web Service***

<cffunction name="productlist" access="remote" returntype="array" output="yes">

<cfquery name="qProducts" datasource="operatorsPostgres">
SELECT * from tablename
</cfquery>

<cfset aRetvar=arrayNew(1)>

<cfoutput query="qProducts">

<cfset singleItem = structnew()>
<cfset singleItem["productname"]= ProductName >
<cfset singleItem["producttype"]= ProductType>
<cfset arrayAppend( aRetvar, singleItem )>

</cfoutput>

<cfreturn aRetvar/>

</cffunction>

***Action Script Call***

productObj = mapService.productlist( result.flashmapuuid , _global.domainid, _global.cfid , _global.cftoken , _global.thrivedsn );

productObj.onResult = function(result) {

_root.application.form.dgProducts.dataProvider = result;

}

Wednesday, July 14, 2004

Switch between flash player versions

Useful development tool to see how your swfs look in different versions of the flash player Eyezberg : bringing you the latest Flash. It is a stand alone application, just trying it at the moment.

Onfolio

I have always found bookmarks a little lacklusture. Onfolio is a PC app which offers a viable alternative to, designed as a researching tool it helps you store urls, pictures, pdfs etc in an organised manner with notes attached . It is an excellent piece of lateral thinking.

Tuesday, July 13, 2004

Postgres Tools

About 6 months ago I migrated the major project I am responsible for from MSSQL Server to Postgresql. The move was fundamentally easy, stress free and opened up opportunities to start using Geo-Spatial queries. This is my second experience of Postgres, it has moved on heaps and there are some good third party tools available, which makes life much easier and opens the product to less techy people.

Some useful tools are available for Postgres including Aqua Data Studio which is the equivelant to Query Analyser (and can point to MSSQL anyway). It is much faster also. Additionally I have found EMS PostgreSQL Manager 2 to be invaluable.

Kartoo

This is a great use of Flash, and an interesting approach to a search engine, just goes to show, there is more to searching than Google out there.

Speeding up Flash MX 2004

According to Macromedias Technotes – delete all the files in your c:\documents and settings\username\local settings\temp directory. You will need to do this periodically to keep the benefits. My Flash works a lot better now, specially on testing movies which saves loads of time.

Monday, July 12, 2004

Flash MX Extensions

I have only recently explored the power of extensions in Flash. Having come from a Cold Fusion background I am familiar with udfs, custom tags. I can't stress how useful it is to visit the flash developers exchange to explore this very useful resource.

DataGrid Column Editor, V1.0

The DataGrid Column Editor, V1.0 can save you time formatting the titles of Flash MX 2004 Datagrids. Awesome! Seems only to work with newly inserted grids, however, well worth a look :)