Monthly Archives

Categories

Sponsored Links

Search

News Flash Archives

« (  1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  |  6  |  7  |  8  |  9  |  10  ) »

MAX 2005 Keynotes

(0)

(0)

10/26/05, 02:25 PM

Videos from the MAX 2005 General Sessions are now available at Macromedia's website.

Jakob Guy Jesse

Mike Downey has posted the demo files from his "Building expressive content with Flash 8" session at MAX. I was not at MAX, but I decided to download them anyway and take a look. What I found most interesting was a set of Flash 8 Cartoons that showed off the new features of Flash. They're very entertaining shorts, and feature cameos from Jakob Nielsen, Guy Watson, and Jesse Warden. Definitely worth checking out.

Update: Nectarine has posted these Flash 8 animations on their website.

FP8 Download Stats

(0)

(0)

10/17/05, 02:46 PM

John Dowdell reports that during the keynote at MAX, Stephen Elop announced that Flash Player 8 has been downloaded over 100 million times since it was publicly released a month ago. The Flash 8 audience is now growing by five million people a day.

Update: Jen deHaan's notes from the keynote mention that Kevin Lynch announced there have been 1.5 million downloads of Studio 8 so far.

Macromedia Labs

(0)

(0)

10/17/05, 09:59 AM

Coinciding with the launch of the Flex 2 Product Line Alpha, Macromedia Labs went live today. The new mini-site includes a wiki, source repository, downloads, samples, documentation, release notes, video tutorials, and more. In the welcome video, Kevin Lynch states the site will include early releases of products, toolkits, and interesting ideas from the Macromedia engineer teams. Be sure to check out the pages on Flash Player 8.5 and ActionScript 3.0 (which now support Regular Exporessions!) while exploring Labs.

On a related note, the new Macromedia Flex 2.0 MXML and ActionScript Language Reference features a detailed description of migration from ActionScript 2.0 to ActionScript 3.0.

Mike Downey reports that Macromedia is already hard at work on Flash 9 (codename is "BLAZE"). If you own Flash Professional 8 or Studio 8, you will have access to Flash 9 alpha in Spring 2006 to use ActionScript 3.0 and compile to Flash Player 8.5.

If you have any ideas for what you'd like to see in BLAZE, be sure to suggest them to the Flash Authoring Team.

FP8 mailto with subject

(0)

(90)

10/09/05, 04:17 PM

Yesterday I ran into an interesting quirk involving the Flash Player 8 while doing some freelance work. It deals with creating a mailto link in Flash that includes a subject line and testing it locally.

All the client needed was a simple link that would open up the user's email program and insert the proper email address and subject line. So as I've always done, I created a button and added the following code:

on(release) {
	getURL("mailto:email@address.net?subject=Test");
}

Nothing fancy there, just your most basic way to send an email with a subject line. I test it out in my browser like usual... Outlook opens up a "New Message" window... "To:" address is prepopulated, but the "Subject:" line is blank. Didn't expect that to happen.

So I thought maybe Flash was stripping out the "?" and everything after it for some reason. To test my theory, I try linking to Google and adding "?testing" to the end of the URL, like so:

on(release) {
	getURL("http://www.google.com/?testing");
}

When I click that link, the following message box appears:

Macromedia Flash Player Security: Macromedia Flash Player has stopped a potentially unsafe operation. The following local application on your computer or network: (c:\Documents and Settings\...\testlink.swf) is trying to communicate with this Internet-enabled location: (www.google.com). To let this application communicate with the Internet, click Settings. You must restart the application after changing your settings.

That reminded me about the new Flash Player 8 security changes and how local content cannot access remote files. I wasn't sure if that was related to my problem, so I clicked "Settings..." and I was brought to the Flash Player Settings Manager page.

It was the first time I'd come across the Settings Manager, and I was surprised to see the Advanced Settings are actually set in special Flash movie you access from a webpage on Macromedia's website. If you haven't seen it yet, here's a screenshot:

Macromedia Flash Player Settings Manager - Global Security Settings

Note: The Settings Manager that you see above is an image; it is not the actual Settings Manager itself.

The obvious next step here was to edit my locations of trusted local content. So I clicked the "Edit locations..." dropdown, selected "Add Location," and I was presented with this:

Macromedia Flash Player Settings Manager - Global Security Settings

Bravo Macromedia! I applaud your work on this. The path I needed to add was listed right there for me to copy and paste. So I copy and paste the directory (I didn't include the file, because I want to trust the entire directory) and click "Confirm."

The path is now displayed as a trusted location:

Macromedia Flash Player Settings Manager - Global Security Settings

So I close the browser and reopen my test page. I click the link and I am successfully brought to http://www.google.com/?testing. Great. Now time to test if this affects my "mailto" link. So I change the getURL url back to "mailto:email@address.net?subject=Test" and give it a shot. I click the link, and Outlook opens with both the "To:" and "Subject:" fields prepopulated as I wish. Woohoo!

This is of course leading me to believe that when run locally, the Flash Player 8 does strip out the question mark and everything after it in the url, but does not alert the user, unless you make the security setting change that I did. To be 100% sure of my theory, I change the link to the following:

on(release) {
	getURL("index.html?testing");
}

I create a quick default index.html file locally and give it a test run. I click the link and... I'm only brought to index.html... no "?testing" at the end of it. Not what I expected. I tried using "GET" as well and that didn't work:

on(release) {
	getURL("index.html?testing","","GET");
}

So what have I learned from all of this? It appears that when run locally, Flash Player 8 will always strip the question mark and anything following it off the end of the url of the getURL function, regardless of security settings. However, if the url in the getURL function is a mailto link AND your security settings are set to trust your local location, it will prepopulated the values as you wish.

Of course, when the file is uploaded to the internet this isn't an issue, but if you test your work locally first, this knowledge will hopefully save you some headaches.

Google Lab Flash Love

(0)

(0)

10/07/05, 02:12 PM

Google labs has embraced Flash with its beta releases of Google Video & Google Reader apps. Google Video allows you to search TV programs and videos and play them in the browser using Flash. Google Reader is an web-based RSS aggregator that was just released today (announced at the Web 2.0 Conference). For those interested in podcasts, you can to listen to them directly in your browser using Flash using Google Reader.

[Hat tip to Daniel Dura]

Flash Player 8.5

(0)

(0)

10/06/05, 12:20 PM

From Macromedia's Press Release:

Macromedia Announces Flex 2 Product Line and Flash Player 8.5

New Eclipse-based tool to enable millions of application developers to build engaging and effective rich Internet applications with the Flash Platform

Macromedia, Inc. today announced the Macromedia Flex 2 product line and Macromedia Flash Player 8.5, the foundation for building effective rich Internet applications that blend the responsiveness of desktop software, the cross-platform reach of the web, and the breathtaking expressiveness of the Macromedia Flash Platform.

...

Flex Builder 2 is an all new Eclipse-based environment for developing rich Internet applications with the Flex Framework. Flex Builder 2, previously code-named Zorn, can incorporate rich media content from the recently released Macromedia Flash Professional 8, the leading authoring tool for creating rich interactive content.

...

Flash Player 8.5 adds industrial-strength programming power on top of the expressiveness introduced in Flash Player 8, creating a state-of-the-art, cross-platform runtime. It includes a new virtual machine that offers faster runtime performance, full runtime error reporting, improved debugging, and ActionScript 3. ActionScript 3 complies with the latest ECMAScript specifications, and increases developer productivity by making it easier to find and fix errors earlier. Flash Player is currently installed on over 600 million desktops and mobile devices globally, and new versions reach 80 percent of computers on the web in approximately 12 months.

...

Flex Builder 2 will be sold for less than $1000 per developer and will include the ability to develop, compile, and deploy Flex applications that connect to XML and SOAP web services with no additional charges or server licensing required.

...

Alpha versions of Flex Builder 2 and Flash Player 8.5 are expected to be available for download on October 17 in conjunction with the MAX 2005 developer conference. The alpha version of Flex Enterprise Services 2 will be available later in the development cycle. All of these products are expected to be commercially available in the first half of calendar 2006. For more information, please visit: http://www.macromedia.com/go/flex2intro. To sign up to be notified when the public alpha of Flex 2 is available for download, please visit: http://www.macromedia.com/go/flex2notify.

...

More info at their press release and Mark Anders' Blog.

Update: Mike Chambers recorded Kevin Lynch's presentation at the Web 2.0 conference where Flex 2.0 and Flash 8.5 were announced. The video can be viewed at Mike's blog and Google Video. During the 15 minute presentation, Kevin uses Flex 2.0 to build a Flickr image viewer in about 5 minutes.

Featured Product - Special Discount

« (  1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  |  6  |  7  |  8  |  9  |  10  ) »