David Stiller’s blog

Back in March, I made a quick blog post (“New O’Reilly Title, Coming Soon!”) about a book I had just finished co-authoring.  My eleven chapters were done, and I was happy with my portion of the book (the other chapters were not yet completed).  This one aims to help folks migrate their existing skill set from ActionScript 2.0 to ActionScript 3.0.  Which folks in particular?  Not the hardcore programmers.  There’s a whole community of advanced developers, most of whom are now using Flex, that doesn’t need this book  This reference is for people who have a decent understanding of timeline coding, who may have begun writing custom classes in AS2, but do most of their programming in the Actions panel and are bewildered by the changes in ActionScript 3.0.  From a standpoint of tone and encouragement, I like to think this book has a lot in common with Colin Moock’s InsideRIA.com article “ActionScript 3.0:  Is it Hard or Not?,” which I’m quick to recommend on various forums as a confidence booster.  You can read a few chapter excerpts from the links below.  Keep reading »

Adobe has announced the CS4 lineup!

Hop around to your usual favorite Adobe-focused blogs, and you’ll find quite a few sites demonstrating new features (and there are tons of new features in all of these apps!).  Chris Georgenes, for example, spells out a number of Flash UI improvements at his keyframer.com site.  Colin Smith demonstrates some slick new Photoshop features at photoshopcafe.com.

And me?  I created four Flash CS4 video tutorials at the companion website for Layers magazine, layersmagazine.com.  Check ’em out!  If any of you are curious what I sound like, now you’ll know.    I’ve enjoyed working with the Layers folks very much, and will be happy to do so again, so this might just be the beginning!  Quick note:  I did include sample files with some of those videos, but until Adobe makes Flash CS4 available for purchase or trial download, you wouldn’t be able to use them (they’re saved as CS4 files, which means they don’t open in CS3 — you can actually save CS4 files as CS3 files, but naturally the new features disappear when you do).  I’m assuming Layers will update those pages when the time comes.  If not, I’ll pester them, and/or you can email me for the sample files.  Keep reading »

Last night, at the stroke of midnight (I kid you not), I finished the very last exercise for the very last chapter on my plate for a new book for friends of ED.  When I lifted my hands from the keyboard, I was beaming.  Why?  Because it’s been a long time since I’ve had a normal work week.  This is all about to change, and wowzers, am I looking forward to it!

The main reason I’m happy is that I’m about to get more time with my family—time where I’m not bleary-eyed and half asleep.    Another part of my happiness, though, honestly, is that I’m about to get more time to spend on this blog, on forums, and on tardy email replies.  I’ve added a special folder to Outlook just for blog comments.  I really do read every single question, and I do my best to answer them.  If you’re still waiting to hear from me, please keep hangin’ on!  I’ve been behind on replies for months (that Outlook folder has 62 items as I write this) … but that’s about to change too.  Keep reading »

In one implementation of the QuickTime VR format, known as QTVR Object Movies, the user can click-and-drag an image to seemingly rotate it, as if spinning the real-life object on a lazy Susan.  This simulated 3D interactivity can improve multimedia curb appeal, and makes for a nifty way to showcase merchandise.  But it doesn’t stop there:  the same basic principle can also bring click-and-drag responsiveness to short video sequences and even user input widgets, such as the click-and-scrub input fields of numerous Adobe dialog boxes.  Keep reading »

In one of the recent comments to “How to Position Movie Clips Based on Browser Resizing,” a look at the ActionScript 2.0 Stage.onResize event, reader Eddy asked about adjusting an image loaded at runtime; particularly, about fading in an image set to scale and reposition itself based on the size of the browser.  I was originally going to reply to his comment directly, but this seems to me like something that would make a decent blog entry of its own, so here’s one particular stab at it.  Keep reading »

My favorite mechanism for embedding SWFs, hands down, is Geoff Stearns’ SWFObject.  It’s clean, lightweight, and easy to use.  Since April 2006, SWFObject has been my first choice for working around the “click to activate and use this control” warning in Internet Explorer.  Microsoft has decided to remove this activation behavior from Internet Explorer in April 2008 — right around the corner, as of this writing — but there’s still plenty of reason to keep right on using SWFObject.  Why?  Because it provides an elegant way to detect what version of Flash Player (if any) a website visitor has installed.  If you’re using the On2 video codec, for example, it means your site requires Flash Player 8 or higher.  With SWFObject, you can detect if your visitor has at least 8 and then display the SWF; otherwise, display a stand-in message (or image), such as “This site requires Flash Player 8 or higher.”  But what if you want to redirect to another page instead?  Or what if you want to display two different SWFs, depending on what’s installed?  Read on.  Keep reading »

I just finished the last of my eleven chapters for a new O’Reilly title, ActionScript 3.0:  The Quick Answer Guide for Flash Professionals, last Wednesday.  This was shortly after lunch, 12:30 on the dot, and a neat thing happened almost as I lifted my hands from the keyboard (more on that in a sec).  The rest of the book is still being written, and it’s shaping up nicely.  I’m pretty excited about this project already!    The aim of this reference is to help developers, even keyframe coders, get up to speed with AS3, so keep your eyes peeled in June!

I took a wild tumble off the grid while I was researching and writing for the past five or six weeks, so I apologize for my late replies to blog comments and email.  I’ve been catching up on my inbox since last Wednesday and plan to reply to everyone as soon as I can.  Thanks, so much, to my friends for all the encouragement!  (Go, FlashGods.org!)

I’ll be going over author reviews in the coming weeks, but the heavy lifting is behind me.  The neat thing that happened, on day I finished, is this:  I went downstairs to gaze out the window for a few moments, and right as I did, UPS brought a package to the door.  I opened the box, and inside was a huge tin of Turkish coffee (over a pound!), imported from Turkey, sent by reader Çağatay.  What a way to commemorate the milestone!  Thanks, Çağatay!  This coffee is a real treat!

You certainly don’t need ActionScript to make use of embedded fonts.  You can always just embed font outlines manually by selecting a text field, then using the Embed button in the Property inspector.  Select your range of characters, type in your text, then publish; you’re good to go (and you only need to do it with dynamic and input text fields:  static text fields embed font outlines automatically).  In fact, if your text field has an instance name — something you can also set in the Property inspector — then you can determine its text content with ActionScript and the embedded font outlines still hold.  But if you’re using ActionScript to create text fields on the fly, the mechanics are a bit different.  Let’s take a look.  Keep reading »

One of the main tenets of good Web design is the principle of progressive enhancement.  In general, the idea goes like this:  make sure the user can access a web site’s essential content regardless of browser.  It shouldn’t matter whether the user visits your site with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Netscape, or pick your favorite flavor.  In fact, the site’s content should be accessible even without JavaScript or peripheral plugins like Flash Player.  Once the basics are covered, use CSS to enhance the visual design.  Then, and only then, introduce the whizz-bang stuff — nifty rollovers, AJAX interactivity, Flash — and do it in a way that doesn’t penalize users who don’t have (or choose to disable) the needed machinery.

Sound pretty neat?  I’ve seen a few examples of this online and at conferences, so I delved into this topic myself to see how much fun it might be.  Turns out it can be somewhat challenging, but definitely fun to see the results.  I put together an example in order to explore the basic mechanics of this form of progressive enhancement — a slideshow SWF that takes its cue from the HTML in which it appears — and turned it into a three-part series on CommunityMX.com.  The first part is free and covers how to get the HTML from the Web page itself into the SWF.  The follow-up articles go into how to parse that HTML in AS2 and AS3.  CommunityMX offers free trial memberships, so if you aren’t interested in becoming a subscriber, you can wait until the follow-up that interests you gets posted (not sure yet when that will be), then sign up for the trial membership.  Of course, if you want to subscribe, that would be cool too!

http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=02395

Flash Player has supported a limited subset of the HTML specification since version 6 — just set a text field’s htmlText property to an HTML-formatted string and you’re good to go.  Fortunately, <a> (anchor) tags are among the supported few, which means you can even put working hyperlinks inside your text.  Not only that, but Flash includes a special protocol, asfunction, that allows you to trigger functions from those hyperlinks, in case you prefer to do that instead of visiting URLs.  ActionScript 3.0 uses a different approach, but if you’re coding in AS1 or 2, just replace http://someURL.com with asfunction:someFunction,someParam, as described elsewhere on this blog.  If you’re coding in timeline keyframes, it’s all pretty straightforward.  But asfunction can seemingly break when used in custom class files.  Here’s what’s going on and how to fix it.  Keep reading »