ExternalInterface Bug in Flash Player 9

By scott

In Flash Player 8 a lot of the work I have done on the Rolex suite of sites has worked fine, once the Flash Player 9 update came out we noticed some very mysterious Javascript errors and only in IE on a PC. The error was very undescriptive, Syntax Error Line 53. The other odd thing was nothing broke, all of the javascript was executed, and all of the actionscript was executed. We were simply doing a call down to a javascript that executed some tracking and analytics calls. It was a very basic ExternalInterface.call method call. We even commented out everything else in the Actionscript and Javascript functions. We still saw the error. Using Microsofts script debugger we discovered that the javascript error is in the Javascript that the Flash player appends to parent.window, this javascript is used in the communication between flash and the browser.

I put a call into Adobe/Macromedia support and they confirmed it is a bug in Flash Player 9 and will be fixed in the next release. Unfortunately they couldn’t tell me when the next player will be released. This bug isn’t documented on the Flash Player 9 bug page, however another strange and unrelated bug is. If you have a hyphen in the your swf file name ExternalInfterface communication will not work. I hope this is not a sign of what is to come with the Adobe future.

Let me know if anyone else has run into this issue.

Flash Player penetration rates as of June 2006

By scott

Adobe just released the latest Flash Player penetration rates. Nothing yet on Flash 9 but Flash 8 has broke the 80% mark in all markets. It probably won’t go much higher from here since the only player you can download now is 9. And since sites like MySpace are forcing users to download Flash 9 I’m sure the penetration rates will rise very quickly. http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html

Get sloppy and see how your site runs at 28k

By scott

Our friends at www.dallaway.com have created one of the best QA tools since VMWare. Sloppy deliberately slows the transfer of data between the client and the server. Essentially, Sloppy is a proxy and purposely bottle necks your connection to simulate a selected modem speed. Sure you and all of your friends have high speed connections, but there are still 25 to 30 percent of the (North American) population that connect to the internet through traditional phone lines 30 percent is a large portion of potential hits on your site so you better make sure it isn’t painfully slow and that it works on dial-up. Sloppy is the perfect tool for this. Make sure you download it and add it to your web development tool belt.

Thought this was pretty funny

By scott

Most of you have probably figured out my name is Scott Morgan, that is why I found this article pretty funny. Sorry to anyone who is from Scott or Morgan county, but I couldn’t resist. Skip down to about the 4th and 6th paragraph to see my name in (broken) lights.

Damage from the storm over Scott, Morgan and rural Sangamon Counties consisted of the snapping of power poles and major tree damage, either ripped up or uprooted. Numerous farm buildings (both Morton type buildings and barns) were damaged or destroyed, as were numerous grain bins. One mobile home was destroyed.

http://www.crh.noaa.gov/ilx/?n=mar12-tor1

The Tween class is not just for bouncy balls

By scott

People don’t always realize that the Macromedia Tween Classes does more than just move MovieClips or fade MovieClips in and out. I wish I got a nickel for everytime I heard someone say I didn’t know you could do “that” with the Tween class. Most people do not realize you can tween filters (blur, dropshadow, glows, bevel, etc). And even more people don’t realize you can use the tween class to control volume on a sound object or change the font size of a text field. Basically you can blur any property. Here is an example of text being blured via the tween class.

import flash.filters.BlurFilter;
import mx.transitions.easing.Regular;
import mx.transitions.Tween; 

var template_mc:MovieClip = this;
var textHolder:MovieClip = template_mc.createEmptyMovieClip('textHolder_mc',
 template_mc.getNextHighestDepth());

var tf:TextFormat = new TextFormat();
tf.font = '_serif';
tf.color = 0x000000;
tf.size = 18;

textHolder.createTextField('text_txt', 1, 0, 0, 200, 50);
textHolder.text_txt.text = 'This is my device font uber blur test';
textHolder.text_txt.autoSize = 'left';
textHolder.text_txt.setTextFormat(tf);

textHolder._x = (Stage.width/2) - (textHolder._width/2);
textHolder._y = (Stage.height/2) - (textHolder._height/2);

var blurText = new Tween(textHolder, "blur", Regular.easeOut, 0, 16, 3, true);
blurText.onMotionChanged = function(ev:Object) {
     ev.obj.filters = [new BlurFilter(ev.obj.blur, ev.obj.blur, 3)];
}
blurText.onMotionFinished = function() {
     this.yoyo();
}

Here is an example using the tween class to change the font size of a text field.

import flash.filters.BlurFilter;
import mx.transitions.easing.Elastic;
import mx.transitions.Tween; 

var template_mc:MovieClip = this;
var textHolder:MovieClip = template_mc.createEmptyMovieClip('textHolder_mc',
 template_mc.getNextHighestDepth());

var tf:TextFormat = new TextFormat();
tf.font = '_serif';
tf.color = 0x000000;
tf.size = 18;

textHolder.createTextField('text_txt', 1, 0, 0, 200, 50);
textHolder.text_txt.text = 'This is my device font test uber size test';
textHolder.text_txt.autoSize = 'center';
textHolder.text_txt.setTextFormat(tf);

textHolder._x = (Stage.width/2) - (textHolder._width/2);
textHolder._y = (Stage.height/2) - (textHolder._height/2);

var stretchText = new Tween(textHolder.text_txt, "size", Elastic.easeOut, 18, 75, 2, true);
stretchText.onMotionChanged = function(ev:Object) {
     var newSize = Math.round(ev._pos);
     var tf:TextFormat = new TextFormat();
     tf.size = newSize;
     ev.obj.setTextFormat(tf);
}
stretchText.onMotionFinished = function() {
     this.yoyo();
}

Any numeric value can be “tweened”, try it out yourself, it is a very useful class.