Flash Components - Tips for Inspectable Metadata for Color and Font Name types
For a good introduction to creating your own Flash Components, see Creating Components with Flash MX 2004 by Joey Lott. He describes the metadata tags for specifying parameters that can be set via the Properties panel. The Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Live Docs on Adding Component Metadata aren't very thorough.

The examples are clear enough for simple datatypes, such as Numbers and Strings. Here are two other data types of interest.

For Color values, set the type=Color, and be sure to specify the RGB hex defaultValue in quotes with a preceding number sign as shown here:

  [Inspectable(defaultValue="#00ffff",type=Color)]

If you do it right, for that parameter, the user should see a bar of color in the Parameters pane of the Properties panel. Clicking on the color bar should bring up a color inspector.

For Font Names, set the type="Font Name", and be sure to include the quotes and the space as shown here:

	
  [Inspectable(defaultValue="Verdana",type="Font Name")]

If you do it right, for that parameter, if he/she tries to edit the parameter, the user should be shown a list of available fonts.

posted on Mon, 19 Mar 2007 at 11:26 | path: /multimedia | perma link

Searching ActionScript .as Files under Windows XP
If you try to search for text within an .as file in Windows XP, you might notice that you don't get any search results even when you know the text you are looking for is in the files you're searching. By default, Windows XP will search only the filenames of .as files and not their contents. In fact, it searches the full body text only for certain known file types. To get the full text search of .as files and other file types, you could use something like Google Desktop. Or you can remedy the deficiency in Windows XP using the suggestions in the Microsoft technote 'Using the "A word or phrase in the file" search criterion may not work'.

As per the Microsoft technote, I set this key in the Windows Registy and it worked:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.as\PersistentHandler\(Default) =
                             {5e941d80-bf96-11cd-b579-08002b30bfeb}

Note: To edit the Windows Registry, type RegEdit at the Start menu's Run prompt.

You need to log off and log back on for the change to take effect.

posted on Sat, 17 Mar 2007 at 16:09 | path: /multimedia | perma link

FLV Files

I'm often asked, "I see a lot of sites putting movies up on the web. They seem to be in FLV format. What the heck is an FLV file and what plays them back?" Here is some vague information to get you started. I'm too lazy to research the details definitively right now.

FLV is a "Flash Video" file. It is a format that is designed for web playback, offering high rates of compression. Several products output in FLV format, including Sorenson Squeeze (I think Sorensen developed the FLV format and Macromedia licenses it). (The term "movie" often refers to common Flash source files (.FLA) and deployed files (.SWF) and is not synonymous with "video").

The Flash Player browser plugin can play an FLV, but that FLV, to my knowledge, must be either embedded in or linked to a SWF. That is, you can't just put the FLV on an HTML page, me thinks. You can check if something is running in Flash Player on Windows by right-clicking on the content. If the pop-up contextual menu says "About Macromedia Flash Player 7" then you know it is running inside Flash Player. On the Mac, I think you need to Ctrl-click since there is no right mouse button.

You need Flash Player 6 or later, I believe, to play an FLV inside a SWF. Flash Player 7 (the current version) can also provide "progressive download" of external FLV files, which is not quite the same as streaming. For true streaming, you need FlashCom Server on the server side (and either Flash Player 6 or 7 on the client side). Or I guess there might be thrid-party imitators.

Macromedia also sells a "Flash Video Kit" for Dreamweaver, which I believe creates the SWF for you. It also compresses the FLV using Sorensen Squeeze Lite.

Anyway, this is all explained in the Preface to "Programming Flash Communication Server". Also see the chapter on video in that book for more info about the tools to create FLV files.

Happy FLVing!

posted on Tue, 03 May 2005 at 10:41 | path: /multimedia | perma link

Resources for Flash and ActionScript development

I'm often asked how to get started in Flash or where to learn more about ActionScript.

See more ...

posted on Wed, 02 Mar 2005 at 15:27 | path: /multimedia | perma link

Personal Video Recording from your TV

You've heard of TiVo and ReplayTV. But there are alternatives out there, such as MythTV (mythtv.org), software that turns your computer into a TV recording device and more.

See more ...

posted on Wed, 02 Mar 2005 at 11:35 | path: /multimedia | perma link