Archive for the ‘Flash Dev’ Category

The new flash player 10.1 on Windows and Mac breaks embedded font rendering. See image below.

This is very disappointing. This is going to affect my customers badly, and there is nothing I can tell them. Just another reason to be very nervous about the future of Flash.

Before 10.1 on the Left, After 10.1 on the right.
Hopefully there will be a fix for this soon.

The announcement of the iPad has set off a huge Flash v. Apple the rest of the world debate.

I happen to think reasoned thought should take effect, hence I agree with the John Nack.

Flash is the closest thing we have to a consistent rich browser frame work. That is why I wrote Lifetick in Flex. I have thought about moving it to HTML only, but I don’t want to do it just yet.

Well, not until we have a richer html/javascript/css world – with a broad range of native gui controls (and which 99% of the world’s internet users have a compatible browser – no IE6, 7 or 8). Standards take time to create, to be agreed on and adopted by the masses.

However, my support of Flash has been tested, I have dropped my Flash blog, and you are now reading this in HTML. In my mind, Mac performance has never been more critical to the future of the Flash player.

btw, I find it laughable all those people who criticise Flash web ads… what do you think advertises will do if people all have flash blockers?They will make the exact same ads work in javascsript, which if written just as poorly as their flash versions, will screw up your browser just as bad, and you can’t separate that cpu thread out, or block an individual execution of javascript if it all goes bad or you want to block it. Think about it, those ads will not go away, even if Flash did.

My personal take on Flash on the iPad… Yes I would like to see it. Flash on the iPhone – I doubt it would work performance wise.

Tonight I relaunch my website as a HTML wordpress template for the first time. For the last 5 years or so I have always run a Flash based website. I even sold the flash wordpress template to lots of other enthusiastic people (note: still for sale).

So why have I gone HTML? Several reasons;

1) Mac performance. After upgrading to Snow Leopard, Flash’s performance on OSX sucks. Infact I haven’t seen it this bad since I ran Flash 7 back in 2005. The truth is Flash had come a long was, versions 8 and 9 made huge performance improvements. However these gains have been lost and it makes it difficult, if not impossible to create large scale flash sites for the Mac.

It’s not impossible though! I also develop Adobe Flex applications and they are ok. Whilst it might take 80% CPU to run a YouTube clip, a Flex application I developed (Lifetick) runs at about 13% CPU and performs quite well.

If Adobe want to keep Flash as a viable development platform, they have to address this issue quickly.

2) The Flash IDE sucks. It’s too clunky, slow and just painful to use. The transition to AS3 was a nightmare (and I was familiar with AS3 already  from working with Flex… go figure). I was able to put together this new template in just 2 nights (there is still more work I want to do to refine it) but all the work I did was done in TextMate, a fantastic powerful lightweight text editor which does heaps with out all the pain.

3) CSS3 and transparent PNGS. Advanced CSS and using transparent PNG graphics allowed me to create this template faster. In particular the Navigation bar owes a lot to this. None of this might be terribly new, but my eyes are opening up to the possibilities.

It really pained me to write this, I get really annoyed when I read people putting Flash down, they mention stuff like no deep-linking (solved, check out SWFAddress), and terrible user experience (Flash doesn’t create bad websites, people do!). Whilst my love of flash websites has taken a hit, my love of Flex is only stronger. I still consider it the best way to create a rich web based application. My day job revolves around developing a HTML base application, but my spare time is spent working on a Flex based application. And I fell like I work faster in Flex, and deliver far better results.

So I don’t want to see Flash die, I want it to get stronger, I want Flex to get more acceptance in the Web-apps developer sphere. But most of all I want Adobe to work on the Flash player’s performance. Seriously guys, you are running out of time before too much damage has been done and your technology is worthless.

Here is some interesting performance observations I have mad since installing Snow Leopard.

Flash 10 in Safari appears slower.

However, if you are using Camino, Flash performance is significantly better. (maybe better than Leopard – just a feeling)

Firefox, seems about the same as before, although I don’t really like using it. Chrome is the same as Safari.

If you work with a lot of Flash apps and need the best performance, switch to Camino

Hi all,

After several months of working in my spare time, I have finally launched a new version of my website, this time based on Actionscript 3.

I still have more work I want to do on the site before I am happy with it. Both visually, and behind the scenes.

Converting my website to AS3 was more difficult than I ever imagined. I have written a lot of stuff using Adobe Flex (see Lifetick’s app) and am very familiar with AS3 but in the Flash IDE it was very tough.

Flex builder is based on Eclipse and it is a very strong coding environment. For a start, all classes are automatically imported, there is great code completion (including completing your own classes, variables, function etc…) The debugging is excellent, including debugging from the browser, and it will not even compile if you have a problem in your code (flash sort of did this, but too many mistakes went through with out identification)

The problems with Flash CS4 are too numerous to mention. Aside from Performance, the workspace layout feels too complicated and cluttered. The new motion editor for tweens seems great, but just makes it harder to do simple tweens (maybe I need more time with it) The debugging was very difficult. As I said before, you could not debug from the browser only from a stand alone swf (if I am wrong about that, please correct me in the comments with instructions), The connection between classes and movie clips feels disjointed, movie clips are not as strict as classes but it feels weird to code, plus I didn’t seem to be able to override a function of the class my movie clip is based on.

At the end of the day, I didn’t enjoy making this new version of my site, I felt I battled with Flash the whole time, everything was a struggle, and it left me wanting to return to Flex as fast as possible. If you do any application building, you must try Flex, and leave flash behind, you will not believe the difference.

ps: I have removed the AS2 version of my template from sale, I hope to make the AS3 version available for sale at a later date.

Since this is a Flash blog, many of you might wonder if it is visible to Search Engines. Well I am happy to say it is. It is a rather simple thing but one I felt I needed to explain.

When you arrive at http://tvwonline.net, you are met by a page which redirects you to /flash/. However what you don’t know is that on my domain’s default page there is a link to the real wordpress site. This may not be noticed or looked at by visitors but it is by Google.

So if you find a link to my site on Google and click it where do you go? Well you end up on the WordPress Blog, but, because of my WordPress configuration, any link you click will take back to the Flash version, AND, you get taken back to the correct page on the flash site. (At this point I would like to direct you to the browser’s address bar. You will see that everytime you change pages, the site url is changed. Allowing for Deep Linking, Back/Forward and Google Analytics Statistics to work.

So landing on the WordPress Blog from Google is not always ideal, I could redirect the user using Flash, so they come to the Flash site automatically, but I have left it as a manual process. Recently I had the opportunity to speak to a optimisation expert from Google who advised the same.

So there you have it. Please direct anyone who says with Flash you don’t get Search Engine Visibility/ Back-Forward Support/ Deep-linking or Website Statistics to this post and this Blog.

After receiving many requests for my website’s .fla file, I have finally decided to make it available on my site – but for a price.

It is the same .fla this website is based on. You can find it here (along with an example of what you get)

I offer it in two prices, one for personal use. i.e. for your own site, and a commercial version for multiple customer’s of yours.

My reasoning for selling it is to try and recoup my hosting costs, and because people offered my money for it – and who am I to say no

Anyway, I hope this makes it slightly easier for other people wanting to make a website like this.

If you don’t want to pay, there is still free code available, including the php backend which extracts the data from wordpress and some clever actionscript 2 classes which should make the job easier.

All the details and conditions are available on the link.

Ever Since I launched my Flash website with a WordPress backend, I have received numerous emails and comments asking me how I did it.

Today I will make available some of the PHP code I wrote to extract Data from WordPress in an XML format. I have also created a diagram and explanation on how my website works to hopefully assist anyone else who wants to try the same thing.

I should point out that I haven’t made available an end to end solution, you will still need to do a lot of work, but I hope that I have provided a good starting point.

The PHP Script makes an SQL query to a MYSQL database holding the WordPress Data. The PHP Script then formats the data into XML. This then can be loaded by your Flash Website. There are functions to retrieve Posts and create Menus.

This is the first time I have released any code snippets or any sort of guides, I hope it proves useful.

Click Here for the Download and Explanation.

I got a cool surprise the other week, – since updating my Flash Website with SWFAddress, Google Analytics has been providing detailed statistics of page views.

For new readers, my website is a Flash front end on a WordPress backend. I was initially worried about how I was going to track page views on my Flash Blog. I put my Google Analytics code on my site’s page just so I could get a least some data. I never realised that it would record all the page views.

SWFAddress provides Deeplinking support by updating the address in the browser’s address bar when ever you click a link on my site, it also updates the title on the Browser’s windows. My Flash website listens for updates and changes the content based on what the address is.

If you have a Flash site and want to track usage, get hold of SWFAddress (http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/) & sign up for Google Analytics.