Macromedia (Adobe?) Flash

Flash 8 File Upload and Download

codecanvas — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 12:32:00 GMT

This is cool! Macromedia Flash 8 has introduced built-in support for downloading and uploading (with help of server side script) files with server. It is notable that the the player will be able to support uploading more than one file to the server, you can check out the worked out examples at Oniam Software Blog.

Advantage is that now displaying a progress of file upload will be easier. I am not sure if the post-back can be avoided with the help of asp.net 2, will have to check that out.

Scene jumping problem with gotoAndPlay / gotoAndStop

codecanvas — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 14:38:00 GMT

Flash has an nice concept called 'Scene', using which you separate a full movie into various scenes logically and then work on them. This enables the developer from going insane over the countless layers and frames that they have to jump to. One problem I faced with scene jumping with the recent work is that, when you are gotoAndPlay'ing to a scene from the topmost scene it works pretty well, but the problem arises when you have to jump to a different scene from inside of some object placed somewhere else in the movie it simply doesnt work.

After doing some googling I found this FAQ section which explained about the concept of scenes and a way to overcome the drawback. To put a long story short, hen exporting your fla into swf flash just concatinates all scenes one after another into a full length movie. So after exporting there isnt anything called a 'scene' present in the swf and thats the reason objects at innermost level are not able to execute the gotoAndPlay or gotoAndStop functions for scene based jumping. To overcome this drawback we just have to place a label frame to where it has to jump (basically I name it same as the scene itself) and then call the gotoAndPlay("<labelName>") to move the player head.

In flash 2004 macromedia has introduced new concepts named Screens and Forms which dont have the above mentioned drawback, but as I was working on a older file I had to come across this issue.

Why isnt my Flash 2004 components working?

codecanvas — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 14:28:00 GMT

I was working on flash file modification project recently and had to make use of drop down (ComboBox) control present in the flash 2004 UI Components. All was set well and when trying to execute the flash file, the component did not work or rather there was no component but just an empty rectangle in the place. After doing some tussling with the flash settings, I remembered that the flash file was created with an older version, and when I had opened it in flash 2004 pro, it had not set the action script verion to 2 (it was in version 1).

So after reseting the action script verion to 2 in the publish settings panel, the control showed up properly.