2008 October | Psyked

Archive | October, 2008

6 criteria for evaluating business blog post ideas

by James on 15th October, 2008 in External links

http://blog.rebeccamurphey.com/2008/09/23/criteria-evaluating-business-blog-post-ideas/

Flash Player 10 is Live

by James on 15th October, 2008 in Flash

I was a little surprised because I hadn’t thought that Flash 10 was going to go live anytime soon – in fact I’m still not sure if CS4 is available yet. Adobe seems to spend so much time hyping various things that I can’t tell the difference anymore between the ‘things that are coming’ and ‘things that are available’.

But Flash Player 10 is available now. Flash Player 10 support for other Adobe products like AIR or Flex are still on the hazy horizon, but I assume that they’re coming soon. I wish they’d stick to the same release dates for things, or be a little more definate…

Update: I’ve actually had a look into this a bit more thoroughly, and it seems like Adobe are actually keeping to the same release dates – releasing CS4 and Flash Player 10 on the same day. I guess I was just expecting a fanfare or something…

It’s that damned Flex SDK that confuses me – Flex has betas that can publish FP10 stuff way before FP10 goes live, but the Flash IDE doesn’t do betas like that. So if you ignore Flex, then Adobe are sticking to their guns with how they do things…

Tweener and “256 levels of recursion were exceeded in one action list”

by James on 13th October, 2008 in ActionScript

Tweeners’ great, but I came across one little problem the other day: when I tried to remove an externally loaded swf from the stage while it was mid-animation, Tweener could bring the whole Flash movie to a halt with the error ’256 levels of recursion were exceeded in one action list’.

Obviously that’s bad – because this particular error completely stops the flash player with no warning to the end user. And the fact that external content – which I have no control over – can cause this is doubly bad.

All is not lost however, because Tweener has a useful little function: Tweener.removeAllTweens(); ok, so it can interfere with everything on your flash movie as well, but at least it’s stopping the recursion errors.

So, if you try to remove a loaded swf file with .removeMovieClip(), you might find that it’s using Tweener. And if so, call Tweener.removeAllTweens() before you call .removeMovieClip() and you’ll be fine. Phew! case closed. Read More…

Fish Eye Menu in ActionScript 2.0

by James on 12th October, 2008 in Flash

A little while ago we had to do a Fish Eye menu – the magnification effect you see on the Mac OSX dock menu – but we had to do it in ActionScript 2.0, rather than ActionScript 3.0.

Now, Shine Draw have been kind enough to put a version of this out into the wild, but it’s in AS3 [link]. Of course AS3 is faster and nicer, but there are still some out there who want their stuff targetted for Flash Player 8 – which means AS1 or AS2 only – so I backwards converted Shine Draw’s lovely class-based demo to a timeline-scripted AS2 version.