Yup, a very clever move. The Flash player will no longer be a proprietry closed source plugin, shunned by the developers of the world. Hopefully the donation of the Flash player to Mozilla will herald a new age of interative development, and better and more standards compliant integration of Flash content with HTML, AJAX and the browser.
Read about it at these places:
Posted in Development, Interaction
Well, if this isn’t the coolest (im sure i’ve said that before!!) app to come out of google… Gmail on your mobile!
And I don’t just mean surfing the Gmail website on your mini mobile browser… I mean full blown Java app designed SPECIFICALLY for your thumb 
Seriously, it is fantastic, and will change the way you recieve email (at least it has changed me!!) and it looks super cool on my Nokia 6280, which is also a plus 
If you want it, point your mobile to : http://gmail.com/app. You know you want to!
Posted in Development
Last week I had the need to animate a mask over a dynamic text field. Having loaded the content successfully, and setting the dynamic text field to the value of the XML, I then initiated a mask transition that affected the display of the dynamic text. (Ive mocked up a set of simple examples to demonstrate).
A. Not working
[kml_flashembed movie="/blog/swf/notworking.swf" width="400" height="160" fversion="7" /]
Now, Ive used Flash for a very long time, and have never had this problem, so I was (and still am to be honest) baffled as to why, after the transition was complete, my dynamic text field lost its content, because it seemed like such a simple thing to do.
Let me point out a few things.
I did some research to see if others had the problem, and found out that masking dynamic text has been a battle ground between designers and Adobe for many a year. I’m posting my solution to the problem here for you to use, or comment on, or improve. Is it a bug? Is it known behavior? Im not sure, but here’s how to reproduce both the problem, AND 2 solutions :
1. Reproduce the problem
After finding a solution, I set out to reproduce the problem in a simple movie… but initially I couldn’t. This made me question whether there was, in fact, a problem after all.
B. Working, but not solving the problem
[kml_flashembed movie="/blog/swf/working_nomc.swf" width="400" height="160" fversion="7" /]
Turns out, in the example above, the reason it works is because the mask was applied DIRECTLY to the dynamic text field – whereas in my project at work I had applied the mask to a Moive Clip that inside it had a dynamic text field. So, there’s a solution right there… however this DOES NOT answer the question, and is a very limiting solution -imagine you wanted to fade the dynamic text out or move it’s location… it would need to be INSIDE a Movie Clip.
2. Understand the problem
So, in step 1 I was able to narrow in on what the issue actually was – which turns out to be specific to masking a dynamic text field that is in a movie clip. The next thing I did was to try and find out why it was going wrong. To do this, I tried a few things :
Of the above, the only thing that began to work was changing where I set the dynamic text. This sounds crazy, but it appeared that Flash was equating a keyframe in the mask animation to a new instance of the movie clip!! Which meant that each time there was a keyframe, I had to reset the dynamic text – because in this “new instance” no properties had been set. I know (at least I hope) this isn’t what’s actually happening, but anyway, it got me closer.
3. The solution
Where did that leave me? Well, initally, quite annoyed. Because my animation was quite involved, it would mean that i’d have to have actionscript on each keyframe setting the value of the dynamic text… which is a COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME and space.
So, trying one last thing, I decided that I would set the value of the text field in an onEnterFrame handler instead.
onEnterFrame = function(){
textMC._data = "Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet";
}
This I know is a messy solution, but it was the cleanest I could come up with, and more importantly… it works! See for yourself :
C. Working!!
[kml_flashembed movie="/blog/swf/working.swf" width="400" height="160" fversion="7" /]
4. Gotchas
Now this is wierd… if the onEnterFrame handler occurs OUTSIDE the scope of the mask and Movie Clip, when you delete it (the onEnterFrame that is), the dynamic text will disappear. The below example is the same as the working example, the only difference is that the onEnterFrame belongs to the _root timeline.
D. Not working again, because of scoping problem
[kml_flashembed movie="/blog/swf/notworking_scope.swf" width="400" height="160" fversion="7" /]
I told you it was wierd!!!
5. Links
If you have any suggested improvements id love to hear them. Below is a list of the FLAs used in this post ( Flash 8 ).
Posted in Development, Interaction
Ive been thinking a lot lately.
Not about anything in particular – just all kinds of stuff. Truth be told, I was thinking about what I wanted to blog about. And it was while thinking about this that I started to think about original thought.
Obviously i’m not the first person to have an original thought about original thought, but it got me to thinking, and it started a conversation with a co-worker about the amount of rehashed content on the internet. What we talked about was that these days – in the same way major News publishers and TV networks (for the most part) carry the same news, the same story, the same stock footage – our favourite websites, once our favourites because they carried the quirky, the innovative, and the sharp, are themselves becomining homogenised.
It’s not uncommon for each of my 10 favourite RSS feeds from these sites to carry the same content. One links to one, the other links to the link of one… and so on and so forth.
As Jess Jervis says in the episode of Futurama I just happened to watch : “The Internet is about the free exchange and sale of other people’s ideas. We’ve done nothing wrong!”
Which is a very true statement. I mean, that’s the beauty of the internet – that we can all share each others ideas, read them, link to them, create this awesome social network of interconnected thought processes… but I guess what I am lamenting is that even though the internet has reached its’ 100 millionth website, I feel like we are all (by degrees) talking abut the same stuff.
It might be just me, who knows. Maybe I just need to search a little harder, think a little longer… or not worry too much about it. I mean, without the support of people linking to sites, sharing info etc… who would bother putting effort in to creating open source blogs… but then again, without the generic blogs – perhaps the mere effort in making your own custom site would induce more individual thought… but then again, if EVERYONE had to make their own sites, standards might not be embraced, the internet might not be as rich, the open source community not as strong… etc, etc.
So I ponder. And I hope that on the horizon I’ll see the new Boing Boing (eg) and it will NOT just be a list of links from the old Boing Boing.
In the mean time… check this out!
Only 9 days to go till the U2 concert that has been postponed since April this year. Funny thing was that it was meant to be on April Fool’s day… anyway, im geared up for it now, listening to all the old stuff, a bit of the new stuff, and a splash of the odd stuff.
Speaking of which, has anyone else heard the U2-Greenday collaboration? Im not a big fan of the song, but the visual concept behind the song is a very interesting approach to undermining the system. I think the drum beat is great – but I think it’s a very hard thing to mix 2 bands together in this way… especially when doing a politically based song.
Posted in Postacrds
Just doing my regular morning scour of the web, and came across this article in SMH. The article is about a faulty Sony product that nearly burnt a house down… but that’s not what caught my eye. What did was this :
(Screenshot courtesy of SMH.com.au.)
Notice anything *slightly* odd about this?
An article about a Sony Laptop going bad, SPONSORED by Sony!?! WTF?
My boss just pointed out an article over at 37 Signals about Threadless, my favourite Tshirt company. If the figures quoted in the article are correct, they are doing a fine business, and good luck to them. The reason people (like me) keep coming back is because it treats us the way we want to be treated.
The shirts are cool, the UI is spot on, and the community rocks.
Posted in Design, Development
How come every time we go to the football it’s the coldest day on record?!
Went to see Sydney FC take on Melbourne Victory, and although I was a little flat with the flu, even I could have stopped the second goal by Archie!!! Anyway, great night had by all – including the birds, who were feasting on moth and ego alike.
And Matteo thought us aussies didn’t know joga bonito hehehe.
Posted in Postacrds
It’s arrived. Get it here.
Posted in Interaction
