ShortFusion Blog - Flash

Tampa Bay Area: Flex 4, Flash Builder 4 and ColdFusion Builder Meetup and Happy Hour (04MAY2010)

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 11:27:00 -0500

This Spring is really shaping up to be really good for developers in Tampa. And of the upcoming events, this is the freebie one that you'll want to definitely attend. With promises of T-Shirts, software (Adobe Flash Builder 4/ColdFusion Builder) and potentially other stuff (I'm thinking stickers and maybe posters) - oh and adult bevarages - the Central Florida Web Developers User Group is hosting a meetup on Flex 4, Flash Builder 4 and ColdFusion Builder. Click for details and to RSVP.

Keyboard vs Mouse

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:51:00 -0500

Maybe it is because I am enamoured with the world's ugliest, but potentially coolest mouse, or maybe it's that my own mouse is developing quirks that cause me to believe that it is not long for this world, but I've been looking at acquiring a new primary HID. Along those travels, I came across a very old discussion comparing the Keyboards vs Mice. Apparently, Apple spent $50,000,000 in the late '80s, and that's when $50 million was worth something, to study the Apple Human Interface. The result was the discovery of two facts:

Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

Like many things tech, and especially since Apple is involved, opinions run strongly in many directions. My own concerns are my own requirements for interfacing with the hunk of plastic, silicon and dopants at my desk and what sort of experience do I offer users in the applications that I create, web or otherwise. I gotta imagine that there are thresholds and conditions that would impact the truth of those two "facts". One person mentioned in the article says that "there are NO command key equivalents in my product, Smart Labels, except for Undo, Cut, Copy and Paste". The reasoning is that, even though the user may perceive there to be a value in using additional shortcuts, he won't allow it. That seems extreme. What happens when the desired action is hidden behind several layers of menuing or if the action is contextual and you are already using the mouse to highlight the text (modifying case through shortcuts would be very preferable to highlighting and hunting). My own inclination is to add keyboard shortcuts when time or interface will allow me. That doesn't always work and I have lost some recent battles at work to implement minimalistic interfaces that use only keyboard shortcuts. In that case, it was a dialog box, created by a mouse event that just contained a single text input with listeners for ENTER and ESCAPE. My reasoning was that the act of calling the dialog would provide the context for the input, hence no label, and that ENTER and ESCAPE are natural behaviors. As I said, I lost and now the little interface that could have been was obliged to support a Label, a submit Button, a Cancel button (as the corner "X") and an instruction line. My opinion is that, styling aside, the interface is uglier and code is heavier. (Apparently, I might be a little bitter about this) Anyway, where are the lines between performance and usability? I've been perusing user experience resources and the focus has been on eliminating the need for a user to think. And, for casual use software, that makes a lot of sense. However, for productivity software where a user will spend much of the day, I gotta imagine that the kind and thoughtful UI developer is going to allow for improvements in performance that occur through user training - though that means a lot more than just adding keyboard shortcuts.

Simple Actionscript Color Separator Class

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:47:00 -0500

I saw a blog post discussing how to grab the separate composite colors from a unit in ActionScript. This has probably been addressed and solved many times, but there does not seem to be a built-in object to take care of this bit of functionality. You'd think that mx.utils.ColorUtil would be a natural place to find such things, but not so much. So while the author chose to go with string manipulation, I figure it would be a good opportunity to do a little binary work and create a simple little class to keep everything tidy. The general scheme is to perform a Right Shift and then an And. The color information is either 24 or 32 bit with the extra 8 bits in the latter describing the opacity of the pixel. Shifting makes the desired color channel the least significant amount and the logical and with 0xFF will remove any other remaining information. So, to get the channels, it would work out like the following: [More]

Actionscript Apps for Android

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 10:09:00 -0500

Since I have recently hopped onto the Android bandwagon, I've been perusing the market. After installing the working Tricorder everything does some weak by comparison, but I did press on. Surprisingly, I found two ActionScript related apps for Android lately:

ActionScript Reference for Android
Flubble

ActionScript Reference for Android

This ought to be rather self-explanatory. Jonathan Dunlap has whipped together a little android app that offers the AS3 helpdocs. Nothing earth shattering, but a nice way to spelunk the docs. I'm thinking that it'll be my go-to app when I have to kill some time.

Flubble

I haven't quite figured out what to make of Flubble yet. Ostensibly, it is a stubbing app for ActionScript classes. I haven't used this for an actual project yet, but I have run some tests and received my class files both as AS3 and XML. The XML is an interesting option that threatens to have some potential, though I haven't worked out quite how I would use it. It looks to be a nifty little app and I hope that I can fit it into the workflow in some way. Of course, there are a lot of generic supporting apps to be found (text editors, ftp clients, ftp server (odd), flash card makers and the like), but for some reason I was surprised to find an app like Flubble. It does get the wheels turning about what sort of apps could be created for the platform.

Flash & Flex Developer Magazine Is Free With Community Resources

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:27:00 -0500

For those that may not be aware, Flash & Flex Developer Magazine has moved to a free, online distribution model. This is a plus because they used to be quite expensive. I'm not the biggest fan of their site layout, it used to be torturous to navigate it, but they seem to be improving it. And, as a bonus, they have a flash and flex community section that allows you to add your own blog, along with whatever description you care to give yourself (here is the ShortFusion blog profile). They also have areas to promote usergroups and events. [More]

Question about Flash Cross-Compile to iPhone

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 10:07:00 -0500

I mentioned in my last post that an iPhone developer attended a Flex presentation that I gave. He was hoping to get some info on how he might use Flash as a means of producing apps instead of Objective C. Not sure what development environments exist for iPhone development presently, but the idea of using Flash is obviously titillating to some. [More]

Online Actionscript IDE

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:23:00 -0500

I often muse that one of the primary reasons I can't break the MS Windows habit is that Adobe doesn't treat Linux as a first class target platform. I've blogged about this before, but it is still annoying. And Mac isn't an option for several reasons: [More]

Preventing The Browser From Returning A Cached SWF

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 23:28:00 -0500

A quick little snippet using Coldfusion to avoid swf caching at the browser. Swf caching can be a real pain in the but during the development and it can also be annoying in production. When you make updates, you actually want to view them. Anyway, enough chit chat:

swfobject.embedSWF('myFlashApplication.swf?nocache=#CreateUUID()#', 'myDiv', '600', '480', '9.0.0', 'expressInstall.swf',{},{});

So the above snippet, using swfobject because it does the trick so nicely, shows that we are throwing a url parameter at the swf to be injects. Essentially, this does nothing at all. However, the Coldfusion CreateUUID() function will give us an easy-to-generate unique number every time and the unique param. The browser sees a unique url and will grab the swf anew each time.

Actionscript: TextFormat vs StyleSheet

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 23:23:00 -0500

For handling formatting of TextFields in Actionscript, your two easy options are TextFormat and StyleSheets. And they are mostly equivalent in the level of formatting control that they offer:

TextFormat	StyleSheet	Note
blockIndent	-	value to indent entire block instead of only first line
-	display	Supported values are inline, block, none
bold	fontWeight	TF: true\|false; SS: normal:bold
bullet	-	TF: part of bulleted list
color	color	TF: AS notation (0xFFFFFF); SS: HTML (#FFFFFF)
font	fontFamily	TF: 1 font; SS: uses comma separated list of fonts
indent	textIndent
italic	fontStyle	TF: true\|false; SS: normal\|italic
kerning	kerning
leading	leading
leftMargin	marginLeft
letterSpacing	letterSpacing
rightMargin	marginRight
size	fontSize
tabStops	-	Size of tab
target	-	target of link if url != null
underline	textDecoration	TF: true\|false; SS: none\|underline
url	-	Setting to non-null value makes text a clickable link

(Created from Adobe docs on StyleSheets and TextFormat) The use of the two types of flash text formatting options are very similar as well: [More]

Thoughts on Embedding Fonts In Web Pages & Navigational Menus

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 13:55:00 -0500

I'm working on a little web interface for a friend that involves the use of a specific font for the navigation menu items. So far, I've have been a good little developer and have kept everything neat and tidy. The html contains just html with imported style sheets and I have eschewed using javascript by positioning everything with CSS. I can get away with it as a conscious decision was made to ignore IE6 and conform to standards (at least insomuch as the standards are implemented in IE7+, FF3+, and Chrome (assuming that means all webkit browsers & I'll test to make sure that it looks OK in AIR applications too) ).

But fonts are a pain. The friend is a designer, the font WILL be used. That leaves embedding graphics, sIFR, prepackaged Flash or custom Flash. Custom Flash is last because that is what I used, but I will dispatch with the other options as quickly as I can. (There is the @font-face; MS has an IE only font embedding scheme, *.eot files, and FF3.5 will support embedding TTFs but neither is presently practical for wide use.)

[More]

Free Business Cards

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:18:00 -0500

Just a quick heads up. My employer, imageMEDIA (a great source for postcard printing and more) is launching an improved version of our flash-based business card designer (Alex did the work on improving this one) and are offering 100 free business cards to the first 100 users. If you need business cards, this ought to be pretty handy. Just go to the promotional landing page for the details or go straight to the template selector for the Business Card Designer and use promo code FreeBizCard09.

More Flash Site Navigation

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 10:13:00 -0500

Some additional thoughts on the site navigation in Flash. I have a deployed version that you can check out at a great place for postcard printing - actually, make it a two-fer and checkout a mail roi calculator that Alex and I created (Alex made it pretty). (Quick aside, I am responsible it seems for a lot of the facets of SEO at imageMEDIA, so I am pretty much obliged to give the link). I ran into a few problems at deployment that were aggravating, yet solvable. So, for my own recollection and the potential to help someone else, here we go: Problems:

Firefox: When the swf loses focus, particularly with scrolling and other page interaction, the drop down menus will not display until the swf is re-focused by clicking.
Firefox: A border will sometimes appear around the swf; particularly after you click it to re-activate the drop downs.
IE: Browser lose track of the swf and not align mouse event with the flash.

Solutions: [More]

Site Navigation Menus, Pure Actionscript & FlashDevelop

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:10:00 -0500

A recent requirement at work had me having to forgo Flex for a Flash project. I'm replacing a DHTML site navigation system that employs several images, javascript libraries and, more importantly, places over 70 links onto any given page of the site. I've inherited the job of cleaning up the site SEO-wise and all of these links prevent me from cleanly sculpting the site. At the same time, I am working on improving the performance of the site, and, soon, improving the functionality of the navigation.

Anyway, while I like Flex - really, I like Flex, we need to get a room or something - she can be too heavy for some tasks, and the thought of dropping over 100KB of Flashy goodness on everything single page of the site is less than desirable. Instead, at my current level, I am more than halfway there just using a pure Actionscript Flash project and I have kept my SWF size down to under 4KB. Keep in mind, I am using an XML supporting doc that adds 7KB or so, but I would use the same file for Flex or Flash. [More]