Archive for the 'Flash' Category

New DENG Build: 1.0.44

Wednesday, December 7th, 2005

I just published a new DENG build, that fixes a bug that prevented text from showing up when multiple DENG components were used at the same time:

Demo: http://deng.com.br/mx2004/multi/
Download deng.swf: http://deng.com.br/mx2004/deng.zip
Download sources: http://deng.com.br/deng_1_0_44_src.rar

AS3: Loading Class Libraries at Runtime

Friday, November 4th, 2005

The Flash Player 8.5 features a nifty API to dynamically load assets at runtime, using the flash.display.Loader and flash.system.ApplicationDomain classes. Let’s assume we have a package, test.c1, that we want to keep in a separate SWF and only load it into the main SWF when needed.

Flash Player 8.5 Alpha and GIS

Wednesday, October 26th, 2005

This weekend i continued to play with Flash Player 8.5 alpha, and did something kinda crazy (at least i thought so when i started).. I tried to render high resolution GIS data purely clientside with Flash.

In the beginning, i was just searching for detailed, free, redistributable map data of the world, with political country boundaries, and maybe state boundaries too, to write a simple world map component. I was scanning through a lot of link lists, and almost all material i found was either incomplete, not detailed enough or expensive. Except the “Vector Smart Map Level 0 Library”, a huge (1.8GB), free and redistributable collection of all sorts of high detailed geographic data, published by the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA).

FP 8.5: Tooltips over links in HTML enabled TextFields

Monday, October 17th, 2005

If you move your mouse pointer over a hyperlink in an HTML webpage, your
browser typically displays the URL in it’s status bar. In addition, if
the hyperlink has a title attribute set, a tooltip is shown with
a human readable description of the linked resource.

Unfortunately, with rich text used in Flash websites/applications this is
not the case. Your mouse pointer will change to a “hand-cursor”, indicating
you’re hovering a hyperlink, but the status bar will stay empty, and the title
attribute is ignored by Flash, making it impossible for you to find out
where the hyperlink will take you without actually clicking it - a severe
accessibility problem.

With Flash Player 8.5, the behaviour of hyperlinks in rich text controls
hasn’t changed, but luckily Macromedia implemented some nifty API extensions
making it possible to actually find out if the user is hovering a hyperlink
in a HTML enabled TextField.

Flash Player 8.5 - SPEED!

Monday, October 17th, 2005

You heard the news already, Macromedia launched their Labs site today, along with public alphas of Flash Player 8.5, Flex Builder 2 and the Flex Framework 2.

Among the first things i did with those alpha goodies was porting the DENG CSS 3 parser to Actionscript 3.

DENG 2.0 Roadmap (first draft)

Thursday, October 6th, 2005

Macromedia announced the Flash Player 8.5 today, featuring a completely new virtual machine (AVM2), E4X, RegExp, Binary Sockets and W3C DOM Events. Flash Player 8.5 (along with the Flex 2 Framework and Flex Builder 2) will be released as public alpha on October 17th. This marks the beginning of the development of DENG 2.0, a completely refactored DENG version targeted for Flash Player 8.5 and above.

Display SVG in 97% of all Web Browsers

Saturday, May 14th, 2005

Inspired by a blog post by John Dowdell, who was raising the question if it would be possible to trigger a SVG rendering SWF to do the work in case the user’s browser is not SVG enabled, i sat down last night to figure out if this could be solved using mod_rewrite on the serverside in combination with DENG. It actually is possible, with a few constraints. Check out these SVGs (and make sure you have at least the Flash Player 6 installed and enabled) [...]

DENG 2.0

Tuesday, April 19th, 2005

DENG 1.0 has been around for a long time now (almost three years), and there hasn’t been any new code release for quite a while, so some of you might wonder what we’ve been up to, and what the plans are.

SEFFS: To Flash Or Not To Flash

Wednesday, March 16th, 2005

SEFFS Release Candidate 1 is here! SEFFS is a method to deploy Flash sites on top of XHTML in an unobstrusive way.

My Search Engine Friendly Flash Site

Monday, March 7th, 2005

I am currently working on a unobtrusive method to deploy Flash on top of XHTML websites. The method is based on a simplified version of the sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) JavaScript code. It solves several problems Flash developers have to deal with when deploying Flash