Oct 20 2005
MAX 2005 Breezo and source files ‘Integrating Rich Flash Content into Flex Applications’
After delivering my MAX 2005 presentation ‘Integrating Rich Flash Content into Flex Applications‘ today, people have asked me to make my presentation and source files available through my site. Well, here you go. Breezo + source files. I hope more people will be able to learn from it.
I think my presentation went quite OK, even though for some it might have been too technical.
I have to apologize though; a made a stupid mistake (I was a bit nervous) and miscalculated during my session at what time I had to finish. I told myself during the preso that I had to stop at quarter to one but that was WRONG! I should have stopped at halve past already. Funny thing is that I even slowed down at the end because I thought I had time left. So my apologies to those that were affected by that, that was not professional and might have frustrated some people.
14 responses so far
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! for having a TECHNICAL presentation.
For God sake, MAX it’s a Developer conference and session was marked as an ADVANCED, is not it?
Somebody has to teach us better how to deal with all this Flash – Flex 1.5 integration stuff 🙂
And luckily it was you! I undoubtedly learned something new today on this particular issue.
Thank you for a having a LONGER session too 🙂
And please… share your FLA file for the custom skin for the Flex Accordion.
Just for the learning purpose!
One more thing the presentation probably had missed – a definition of what is Flash component (SWC file). You had started immediately with a code.
That’s fine with me, but some in the audience may be had lost a track at this point…
Thanks JP. Good point about the SW explanation, I’ll add that to the presentation next time (MAX Korea). Did you check the sample programmatic skins that ship with Flex?
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! for having a TECHNICAL presentation.
For God sake, MAX it’s a Developer conference and session was marked as an ADVANCED, is not it?
Somebody has to teach us better how to deal with all this Flash – Flex 1.5 integration stuff 🙂
And luckily it was you! I undoubtedly learned something new today on this particular issue.
Thank you for a having a LONGER session too 🙂
And please… share your FLA file for the custom skin for the Flex Accordion.
Just for the learning purpose!
One more thing the presentation probably had missed – a definition of what is Flash component (SWC file). You had started immediately with a code.
That’s fine with me, but some in the audience may be had lost a track at this point…
You did very well during your lectures. I like it… please share more of your stuffs to the public.
Thanks
wow looks like you covered a LOT of information! 😉
Looks like you talked about Flex as its available right now, not the Zorn alpha — was just about to post to ask if you prefer SWC skinning over CSS. What I particularly like is that you can now apparently use Flex Builder 2 for compiling AS only projects so you don’t have the overhead of the Flex framework if you don’t need it and can still stay in the Eclipse framework without relying on open source alternatives.
Hi Peter. Indeed I covered 1.5, for two reasons:
– What I discussed is a real problem with customers NOW, so I need to provide them with a solution that works now.
– The preso containeds two parts; overview of possibilities and technical implementation. In general this concept is expected to stay the same.
One last reason not to go too deep into Flash IDE + Zorn integration is the fact that the Flash IDE can not compile for AS3 yet, which makes the process more complicated untill that’s fixed.
Correct that Zorn supports AS only compilation, but that’s not going to help out with creating visual SWFs.
SWC vs CSS: if you don’t want to change shapes, only colors, CSS might be the easiest solution. However, with SWC/programmatic skinning you can go beyond that.
Good point about visual SWFs, Zorn probably won’t be very practical for that.
Mike did post an example on Flashcoders a while back that shows not only changing colors but actual skins through the CSS (though that’s Flex 2.0 specific, so not applicable to your session ;)).
.windows
{
upSkin: Embed(source=”button_up.png”);
overSkin: Embed(source=”button_over.png”);
downSkin: Embed(source=”button_down.png”);
}
Really exciting feature for quick and easy skinning.
By the way,
If speaking in a language of Macromedia codenames:
Zorn = Flex builder 2
Mistral = Flex enterprice services 2
Zaphod = ???
By the way,
If speaking in a language of Macromedia codenames:
Zorn = Flex builder 2
Mistral = Flex enterprice services 2
Zaphod = ???
In Zorn you can actually do the following:
.windows {
upSkin: Embed(source=”skins.swf#UpSkin”);
overSkin: Embed(source=”skins.swf#OverSkin”);
downSkin: Embed(source=”skins.swf#DownSkin”);
}
where UpSkin, OverSkin, DownSkin are movieclips in the library (linkage ID’s).
Doesn’t get any easier than that 😉
The Flex app from your presentation Pharos Reizen… Did the Flex app go online?
I entered http://www.pharosreizen.nl/ web-site, but it seems to be all ASP + HTML based….
Hi Waldo,
Thanks for your presentation. It’s helped a lot!
My intrests are focused on coding AS3 with Flexbuilder to make Flash games. And I would like to be able to control the animations of Movieclips that I embed via AS3, perhaps similar to what you did using MXML.
Its great that we can embed assets during compile time via code and associate them with a class.
However, when i embed an SWF it automatically becomes assiociated with the Sprite Class that doesnt have a timeline and cant have any properites assigned to any movieclips inside it(ie. instance names on the movieclips) . And also, I’ve unsuccessifully tried to find a way to embed an SWF animation(that has a timeline more than 1 frame) using AS3 and not using MXML. I noticed that you did that with MXML in your source files (1_swf_animation).
Could you give me any hints on how to embed a SWF Animation(with a timeline) with AS3 and also how to use AS3 to control an embedded SWF? Is there anyway we can convert the embedded SWF to a MovieClip instead of just a Sprite?
Here’s a section from Mike Chambers devnet article that mentions what i’m trying to do:
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/flash/articles/flex2_flash.html
For example, let’s say you are working on a game that would benefit from the performance increases and productivity improvements of ActionScript 3.0 and Flash Player 8.5.
You could create all of the assets for the game in Flash 8 Professional. This would include graphics, videos, animations, etc. You could then do all of your programming in ActionScript and Flex Builder 2, and include the Flash assets in the SWF at compile time (ActionScript 3.0 has support for embedding assets and associating them with an ActionScript class).
The end result is a SWF file that contains all of the code and assets for your game, but which takes advantage of ActionScript 3.0 as well as the new Player APIs and virtual machine.
Waldo,
I’ve tried to run the sample code and, being unfamiliar with how Flex uses SWF files, I’m not sure why I am getting the following error:
SecurityError: Error #2047: Security sandbox violation: ‘content’: ‘file:///C:/Flex/WaldoSWF/bin/swf_animation.swf’ may not access ‘file:///C:/Flex/WaldoSWF/bin/drop_shadow_monkey.swf’.
I presume this is an obvious configuration issue – I am just not sure what it is. Any suggestions?
For those encountering securityError #2047 so far as I can telll, this is the new flashPlayer 8 sandbox. However, whereas fp8 allows you to configure access to the local file system, fp8.5 currently just blocks it. If you run the html file on localhost this is not a problem. To automate this in flexbuilder, select Run from the Run menu, uncheck Use Defaults, and set Run to a URL beginning http://localhost. Obviously, you have to develop in a folder your local web server has access to.