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for March, 2007.
By scott
Today at work we ran into another flash player / browser inconsistency. When using MovieClipLoader to load an external asset, the onLoadError event doesn’t fire in Firefox when trying to load an asset from a non-existent domain. In fact, the onLoadStart event doesn’t even fire. The other MovieClipLoader events don’t fire but they shouldn’t, there isn’t any progress and the load never reaches completion or initialization.If you attempt to load a non-existent asset from a valid domain the onLoadError event fires fine in Firefox. In IE and Safari the onLoadError event fires in both scenarios. These are the only browsers I tested but I would be interested in seeing what happens in the others.
So let me break it down. This code doesn’t fire the onLoadError event in Firefox. It just fails silently:
var mLoader:MovieClipLoader = new MovieClipLoader();
var mObj:Object = new Object();
mObj.onLoadError = function(ev:Object):Void {
getURL('javascript:alert("onLoadError")');
}
mLoader.addListener(mObj);
mLoader.loadClip('http://kaljdflkasjdf.com/image.jpg', this);
However, this code and domain do fire the onLoadError event.
var mLoader:MovieClipLoader = new MovieClipLoader();
var mObj:Object = new Object();
mObj.onLoadError = function(ev:Object):Void {
getURL('javascript:alert("onLoadError")');
}
mLoader.addListener(mObj);
mLoader.loadClip('http://www.scottgmorgan.com/image.jpg', this);
Thought I would share this knowledge with the world. Last thing I want is others pulling out as much hair as I do 
By scott
This has been around for awhile, but I still find myself using it when I attempt to step over into the darkside. The dark side being design. Actually I like design, it is what I started out doing, like anything, if you don’t do it everyday you get a little rusty. I have been staring at code so much lately I only see in a few colors. black and white, with a few colors sprinkled here and there for methods and properties. That is why this tool comes in very handy when you are trying to design something with complementary colors (check it out, no u in “colour”, for my next trick I will pull a feather out of my hat and call it macoroni). Simply enter your RGB value or better yet, a hex value and you are presented with 16 colors that work with your entered value. Even better you can lighten or darken the results and the colors remain complimentary to your original color. This tool has saved many of late night design headaches when I can’t bug my real designer friends. Make sure to bookmark this one, you’ll thank me for it.
http://www.colorschemer.com/online.html
By scott
This video is truly inspirational and really demonstrates how digital media has changed and is changing our lives daily. It also looks like a screen cap of my monitor on a good day.
Hats off to whoever created this piece, nice work!
By scott
Just when we thought the Flash Platform arena was starting to dry up (YA RIGHT!) Adobe throws a new tool into our arsenal, Apollo. Apollo isn’t that new, but it is, isn’t it? It’s been around for a bit now, and already has become very popular. All this popularity and Apollo is still only a code name. That alone tells me it is going to be a huge release.I have to admit, I knew Apollo was out there, I knew what it was all about, but I really wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to it. Not sure if it was because I had enough on my plate, or because it wasn’t released yet, or because I have done a lot of flash to desktop work with other third party swf wrappers (zinc, mProjector, ScreenWeaver). I’m not sure.
That all changed on Friday night. I was one of the lucky few who got to attend ApolloCamp. And after seeing some of the sample apps, seeing the excitement in the crowd, and personally seeing the potential of this app., I was pumped. Just check out my intensity in this pic taken of me at Apollo Camp.
I think my holy $@&t moment came during Christian Cantrell’s presentation. He presented script bridging between AS and JS. That one presentation proved to me that no other swf to desktop application can compete. He was injecting JS and AS events into existing sites, injecting and altering css in existing sites, and mashing up some of the biggest properties on the web today with only a few lines of code. His address book and google maps mash up was quite impressive. And his Scout application was every web developers dream app.
Adobe was very generous, amazing schwag (can you say free full version of Flex Builder), great food, lots of beer (and more beer when “people” started to “twitter” on low quantities of beer - I have to admit, I started the more beer twiter rally - not a surprise to anyone who knows me).
So what were some of the other highlights? I’m a little late posting this and I’m sure most of you have already read all about ApolloCamp so I’ll be quick. Kevin Lynch asking what “Moxie” was (for those that don’t know Moxie is the codename for Flex 3), Sean Christmann + project artemis + apollo = light saber == WOW!, Yahoo APIs + Apollo = Endless possibilities (sorry couldn’t resist plugging my peeps). The list is endless. Check out other blogs if you want to read more about the presentations. I don’t have time to type up a transcript of the entire conference, I’d much rather play with Apollo.
To all of you who were not lucky enough to attend. Ahhh hahahahaha, just kidding. The alpha build, documentation, ApolloCamp videos, O’Reilly pocket guide, sample code will all be available on labs.adobe.com sometime this week.
I have to say this was probably one of the best conference I’ve ever been to, very well organized, and very informative. I can’t wait to see what’s next, stay tuned here to see what I build in Apollo, I have a few big ideas, now I just have to find the time to actually dev them.
By scott
Not sure if this is a known issue, or a known fix (workaround). It’s a weird one. For whatever reason, I was getting no sound when test publishing (Command Enter) from the Flash IDE. I also noticed I wasn’t getting any sound when viewing a quicktime video. So I decided to scour the web for a solution. I found one.
Turns out all you have to do is open up GarageBand, create a new project, play a few notes on the piano (I chose Beethoven’s 5th, followed by Push It by Salt n Pepa - I don’t think these songs had anything to do with the fix), close GarageBand, and viola, sound again in the Flash Player and Quicktime.
I’m not sure why this works. Does anyone out there know why? Or better yet, does anyone know a proper fix for this? Mr. Jobs, are you reading my blog?
By scott
The Favourite Website Awards (www.thefwa.com) has chosen the Rolex.com site as their Site of the Day for today (March 14, 2007). As most of you know, I have since moved on from Critical Mass but I still had a lot of involvement in this sites fruition. I was the lead Flash developer on it during my tenure at Critical Mass. Congratulations to all that I was lucky to work with on this great project and congratulations to all who are new and are now working on maintaining it. This is a great accomplishment and something to be very proud of. Keep up the great work and one day you’ll be able to afford one of these amazing watches 
By scott
As I mentioned in my presentation on Tuesday at 360 Flex pipes.yahoo.com have launched a wide open crossdomain file today. Flash Community rejoice! This is huge news for us. Not only does it mean we can load in manipulated aggregated data feeds, it also means we can load in feeds that normally we do not have access to because there is no crossdomain policy. Before you could do this with a php or any server side based page proxy file. But now you don’t have to worry about that. Log in to pipes, do a simple fetch, save it, and load in your pipe through pipes.yahooapis.com. Simple! If needed, you can manipulate the feed, remove unnecessary data and output it. No one wants to parse irrelevant data, especially client side! As some have already said, pipes is the future of the Internet and if we didn’t know it already flash is too!
One last thing, if you want to learn more about using pipes, there is a great video tutorial up on the Yahoo! Developer Network.
Thanks a lot pipes from the entire flash development community.
By scott
I am proud to announce the new Yahoo! AS3 Libraries that were released today on the Yahoo! Flash Developer Network. We timed this launch with the 360Flex conference in San Jose at the Ebay campus. I will be presenting the Yahoo! AS3 Maps Commuication Kit tomorrow morning. As a side note this is my first contribution to the Yahoo Developer Network since I started here a couple months ago. Let us know what you think, and what else you would like to see. We’re here to make your job easier. We don’t want you to worry about accessing all of our data, we want you to concentrating on creating the best application with our data.
Happy Mashing!
By scott
Not only will I be at 360Flex, I will be presenting there. Me and the team I work on at Yahoo! (Flash Platform) are presenting our new AS3 libraries. We will also be covering what we do at Yahoo!, our Flash Development Center, our future plans, and a few other suprises. Sorry, I can’t go into much detail or else you won’t show up We have so much to present we have two time slots - 4:00 on Monday, and 8:30 (yes A.M. ugh!) on Tuesday. We are also planning on doing something at the Monday evening event, again, can’t go into much detail, but I can tell you that you won’t want to miss it.
If you are at the conference come by and say hi. I’m excited to present but I am even more excited to see/meet some of the other speakers and attendees. Lastly, Yahoo! is one of the conference sponsors so you are sure to see lots of purple and yellow floating around. Here is what you can expect to be wearing around your neck.
This is going to be a great conference and is proof that the Flex community is alive and well and poised to take over the world ;).
