Archive for category General

In Flash 9, you can have a Actionscript class associated with the _root of the Movie. You do this by creating a class that extends MovieClip and represents the _root, then in the properties pane, you assign it as the Document Class.

When attempting to use this new feature, I have had a lot of people asking me why they get the error

ReferenceError: Error #1056:
Cannot create property test1_btn on Test.
at flash.display::Sprite/flash.display:Sprite::constructChildren()
at flash.display::Sprite$iinit()
at flash.display::MovieClip$iinit()
at Test$iinit()

This is due to the fact that you must publicly declare any element (Buttons, MovieClips, TextFields, etc.) instance in your class that exist on the stage and is named.

For example, if you have a Movieclip drawn on the stage named "myMc" it would be defined as a public var in your Document class like :

I have been scripting the Windows Media Player on a Windows Media Center Operating System, and ran across an oddity that hadn't seen when capturing events in previous versions of the OS.

ISSUE
When the plugin is in a browser and run locally the scripted events are not being called out.

FIX
Whenever everything is placed on a server it all works correctly.

I was thrown off since the events trigger locally on XP. I can't distinguish any other variants than OS as the cause, does anyone else have an explanation or fix for this?

Adult Swim's website just went through a redesign, and in doing so they brought blog posts to the mainpage of the site. Like any good blog, they have text, images, and yes..FLASH VIDEO. The funny thing is, I literally had about 4 hours to create a lightweight Flash Video player and have it out on the site, but now I can proudly say that Adult Swim uses Flash Video.

A small sign of big things to come!

It's a good question, how do you define yourself or what you do? If you have ever tried, it can be a difficult task. Recently I had to task myself with doing that in the context of programming, as I opted to be a panelist for the Converging Media: Cross-platforms for the People session at the FITC2006 in Toronto. Though I was unable to attend the conference, I was finally able to come close to verbalizing in print why I do what I do. Everyone has their own story, their own desire that draws them to this profession, below is what I said mine was:

Kenny Bunch's passion for programming began at age 8 on an Adam computer. By creating his own choose your own adventure games, he realized early on that he could use the computer as a tool to make his dreams a reality. From that point forward, his mindset became a motivation to create things that would make people's lives better. The first real world opportunity he was given to achieve this goal was at CNN. Serving as the lead Flash developer, he began working on easing the ways the world consumes information, communicates, and entertains itself. Of course, with every quest, there are many markers before the finish. Moving past CNN, he has held positions as lead Flash application developer at Cartoon Network/Adult Swim and as Software Architect at both Bellsouth and Gametap. In an effort to further expand his vision and experience, Kenny formed Dreamsocket. Alongside the work with Turner, Dreamsocket provided an outlet to work with clients like CBS, Rolling Stone, Nascar, Motorola, IBM, ING, and a host of others. Each of these positions, projects, and experiences has been one more step in the quest. Whether it's a smile on a child's face from owning digital cards from Cartoon or connecting long distance friends with communication applications, he is moving forward. However, his goal has not been reached, and each day Kenny strives to do something new in order to give back to world that has given him so much.

So that was my strike at trying to write a quick formal bio. What it doesn't say is how I came from a small town with no concept of anything other than a factory job at best. What it felt like the time I actually created my first program. Skipping grade school to go to my friend's house that had a computer. The fact I grew up with very little, but could create something that was more valuable than anything someone else could buy. What it felt like when a child that had nothing described having more digitial cards (in an application I wrote) than all the other kids in school. What it feels like to be where I am now.

Honestly, everyday I wake up I have to pinch myself. It's hard for me to imagine my life. I have been so fortunate, due to some extremely good luck, some hard work, and some really wonderful friends. I intend to take full advantage of that. As bold as it might sound, I will change the world for the better. Trust me, I've got things brewing .

GameTap.com has released a sneak peak of what appears to be some of the games they will offer and their UI .

They have also posted a link for joining the beta for their product.

Gamespot has an transcript and video interview with Blake Lewin, the inventor of the Turner's new gaming network, GameTap.

Interesting quotes from Lewin:

"We've built a software application that allows us to emulate games from the early arcades all the way through the consoles"

"At E3 we'll be announcing a lot more, and a lot of the publishers we have. We have over 17 publishers signed to date, and close to 1,000 games licensed."

"We're going to grow an on-demand service. So again, we start with these 300 games and eventually it's going to become 1,000, and 2,000, and however big we can get, and the games will always stay on the service."

"It will be clearly downloadable off the Internet. The obvious things--we'll try and get it on discs, we'll try and bundle it with peripherals."

"GameTap will be available this fall, October, 2005."

WHAT
[via cnn]
The service, known as GameTap, will launch this fall with up to 300 game titles from 17 video game publishers. New titles will be rolled out weekly, and the service has licensed more than 1,000 titles so far.

The subscribers will have an "all-you-can-play" gaming service on up to two personal computers as long at they pay a monthly fee. The games are downloaded to the customers' PC, not played across a network, giving them faster response times.

HOW
[via official site]
To access GameTap, players securely download and install Turner-developed client software from www.gametap.com that acts as a gateway to the GameTap library. Because games reside securely on the PC, not across a network, they act just as if they were still on the console or at the arcade. Fast response times, 3D effects, colors, and characters are all present and accounted for. GameTap supports navigation and game play using both keyboard and mouse, as well as most USB peripherals.

TYPES OF GAMES
[via Los Angeles Times] ...games such as "Pac-Man," "Tony Hawk's Pro-Skater 2," "Sonic 3" and "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory."

LINKS

In creating Flash content for the web you are given the ability to push new versions of your application by merely overwriting your .swfs on your server. However, your .swfs are served by the rules of the browser that they are hosted in on the client's system. It is important to understand that this end client application requests new content based on rules of it's application settings.

A browser may request new .swfs everytime it hits your site (not caching anything) or it may follow some other rule of content purging(based on total content cached etc.). Therefore, it is important that when you overwrite an application .swf that you force it to update on a client system. If you understand how an browser treats document requests this is quite an easy task. A normal document request may look like http://www.foo.com/foo.swf, where foo.swf is the document requested. If you append what is called a query string to the end of that request, you can request the same document but send data to it like http://www.foo.com/foo.swf?APPVERSION=1.23. Interestingly enough, each unique query string added treats the request as a new one, forcing the document to be loaded again. With this knowledge, you can see that if I add APPVERSION=1.24 that I will get a new .swf, and 1.25 a new .swf, etc. However, due to caching once I download the .swf and the url doesn't change on the next request the .swf is cached until it is purged by a changed request or settings purge. This behavior allows you to force updates to your users when they make requests by merely adding a versioning variable to the source tags in the embed and object code for your .swf, and in addition to efficiently cache .swfs as well. Caching is important, for instance if the client has a slow connection, say 56k and the file is 150kb. If the .swf hasn't changed they will have to wait to download it each time they visit your site. On the other hand if it is cached on a version basis then they can use a cached version of the base .swf and only load ondemand needed items (data requests, etc.). If you use a content versioning system like CVS, you can easily use the current document version as the version for your swf update. This allows you to be in sync with your system and automate this versioning methodology if you have a formal build script/process.

Another important thing to point out is the FlashVars attribute. This html attribue also allows you to pass information into your .swf. This is an important attribute and should be used to pass all data in. By using the FlashVars attribute all data passed in is sent in to the currently cached .swf, it doesn't force an update of the .swf. If however, you use a query string to pass all your data in, it will force the .swf to be purged anytime you change a variable. This could be bad, if for instance, you had a 100kb swf that had a var which changed constantly. The constantly changing var would cause the 100kb .swf to be served on every request instead of being efficiently cached. If your site was heavily hit, your servers would have to work harder.

[UPDATE] I forgot to mention how to send data into a Flash 5 swf. For those looking for a high adoption rate with Flash 5, you can not use Flash Vars, because it is a Flash 6 feature. In these cases you have to append your data to the query string of your embed. This does not mean that you are at a loss and will have no way of getting around loading the swf everytime. There is a trick you can play. This trick involves putting a proxy swf in the embed that in turn loads your application. The proxy is a blank swf with the simple purpose of loading your swf and maintaining passed in parameters. You app swf is versioned by the proxy appending the version query to its loadMovie operation. The app swf once loaded can then access all the html parameters by referencing them in the proxy. This allows you to have a swf (the proxy) that is less than 1 kb that takes the non cache hit, making it minimal. The application swf is still cached and can access the passed in values.

Hopefully, my explanation is clear and helps out. Post if you have any questions.

Among all its possible forms and interpretations, art is representative of one's interaction via cultural, biological, emotional, or other stimuli. With elections underway and a new Flash player in the works, I am reminded of how expressive Flash has been for myself and others, when used as an artistical outlet.

During the 2000 presidential election, my friend Scott Bower and I expressed our thoughts on the chaotic nature of that election by creating a flash interactive voting application gone wrong. The app mirrored our feelings of frustrations artistically, through various visual and audio elements . It was interesting to experiment with something that provided someone else with an abstract, yet concrete vision of your thoughts. I guess that's what art is when you break down it's essence .

With people like Jared Tarbell and movements like those at processing.org, it will be interesting to see what people are able to do with the new Flash player when it is released.