You might remember my excuse for being a slow poster back in March. I am happy to announce that my home cinema is back up and taking visitors. It now looks like this:
I while ago I worked on a HTML site that would implement sIFR for a custom header font. This was my first attempt at using it and I decided I didn’t really like it that much. Mostly because of the large JavaScript files needed.
I thought to myself that making my own solution needn’t bee so hard so I did. Here it is; introducing SWFHeader!
It works roughly the same way as sIFR does, but it’s a whole lot more stripped down. Like sIFR you edit a FLA-file to embed the font you want to use and export it. Then you insert a few lines into your HTML page and include the JavaScript file required. Now I recognize the fact that sIFR’s code probably is as vast as it is for a reason. Maybe it has better legacy browser support, I don’t really know. What I do know is SWFHeader has worked fine for me and behaves well in IE6+7, Safari and Firefox, and that’s enough for me.
If you’re interested then take it for a spin. There are no fascinating terms of usage to tick off a check box for, nor are there any guarantees. Merely my own experience. Therefore I recommend you test it properly. If you like it (or not) please let me know!
Here are the files:
SWFHeader.zip
So you’ve got an “interesting Britney Spears mp3″ for me to check out. Tempting….
The other day I was writing the code for a simple animated movie. I decided to use a host flash to get the user started quickly and then create a separate SWF file for each scene in the movie. The host flash would then preload the next scene while the current one was playing. MovieHost.as would be the document class for the host movie and Scene.as document class for all the scenes. Simple right? Budget: 6-7 hours including the stop frame animations…
Well, not quite so. I created all the animations in all the swiffs, set up the hos flash to load them in, pressed command+enter to verify my effectiveness. The host flash fires up and loads the first scene but the scene’s code does not seem to run at all. And no error messages? After all this is AS3 - WTF??
I won’t bore you with the details of all my testing, but it went to the point where I started to research the use of explicit application domains and such. After some hours I found the reason, and here it it:
From the Flash documentation on the ApplicationDomain class:
“You cannot override a loaded class definition with a newer definition.”
This says it all really. Close to the top of my HostMovie.as class (where I hadn’t been for a while) I found this line:
private var _currentScene:Scene;
Even though this variable was not being used in any way, the host flash still had a compiled version of the class Scene.as when the scene swiffs were being loaded. I f you look at the comment from the documentation again you realize that of course no code from the loaded swf could run, it’s document class had been discarded in favor of the one allready existing in the host flash.
I removed the unused property definition from HostMovie.as and everything from there on went as planned.
Paulo and Tink were right after all; FOTB wasn’t sold out. The tickets page was just not updated from last year and I’ve got me a ticket. Yeah!
I checked the FOTB site about a week ago and it seems I might have misunderstood the message there about ticket sales not being open. Or maybe tickets were in fact not yet for sale at that point. Either way, those tickets must have been ripped away pretty fast and here I am without one. Actually I’m two tickets short because there are two of us who wanted to be there from my agency.
If anyone has a couple of tickets to spare please let me know because I’m buying! (as you can see from the tags to this post…)
Just when all was going so well winter draws one hell of a dying breath and I get a cold. So I’m stuck in an empty house watching it snow outside with my nose running so bad I keep leaving slime tracks all over the house like a garden snail. Lucky for me there is Playstation 
Grab a beer, It’s St. Patric’s Day. In the words of House of Pain: Put on your shit kickers and kick some shit!
If anyone’s wondering why I’ve been a slow poster lately, it’s because my basement home cinema is looking like this:
I’ll be back when that is done with
A really interesting project I’ve been doing at work is finally live after a little over a month in design and development. I am quite pleased with the result as it is a fully dynamic (with content management system on the way) all Flash, language extendable solution.
The language menu has had to be hidden from view for now. That’s because the site hasn’t been translated yet, but after the first one is in I will be enabling the language selection. From there, extending the site to other languages is a matter of translating and publishing through the CMS with no touching of neither FLA-files or XML needed.
A tricky part of this project was getting the site swf, which filles the entire browser, to scale to fit the browser window, but not so that it would crop the site without displaying scrollbars on smaller screens. The solution was a little javascript that I published in an earlier post.
MasterPhoto captures stills and video by using model helicopters to reach heights and angles unmatched withother types of equipment. The results they can achieve is really stunning. Check out the site!
I just browsed through Microsoft’s download pages to find a .NET Framework install needed for FlashDevelop when I came across this page asking me if I would like to try their shiny new Silverlight-boosted download area. Of course I was curious, so I happily OK’ed the installation link for the Silverlight and waited for my first encounter with MS’ answer to Flash.
Now, why in the world MS would like to be a latecomer in this game in the first place is beyond me, but why even bother to turn up at the table with anything less than at least a decent hand. First, *MS* Internet Explorer crashed upon completion of the installer. When I fired it up again and went back to their much proclaimed download site, the first thing I got was this pucker:
Then, after dismissing that dialog I proceeded to click the link that said “Downloads and Trials”, to which the Silverlight application responded with this blank screen:
After a few clicks here and there I managed to land at the correct place to browse for the .NET Framework 2.0 download, but browsing was sluggish and sometimes irresponsive.Come on MS - this is supposed to be a showcase of your great Flash competitor, nothing here is new, nothing here is better and there’s a long way between this and to improve the Download Center experience and make it easier to discover and download Microsoft software a you put it. This is kind of like going up to Ronnie James Dio on stage and saying “Look, I’ve made this song called Holy Diver, and now I want your fame”.
Needless to say Silverlight ain’t scaring me yet.
Interactive designer, Flash programmer, photo enthusiast and a father of a son from Sandefjord, Norway.
