Jul 26
This is something that I came across a while back when I was working on a project that consisted of me having to create 71 FLA’s. Now the problem with creating having to create 71 separate FLA’s is that if you change the Document class that they all utilize, you have to re-publish all of them. Now depending on your computers hardware, what OS you are running, and which Flash CS version you are running, you may only be able to open up 4 to 8 FLA’s at once before Flash Professional crashes leaving you with nothing but frustration.
Well I did searching online for a way to do a batch publish of FLA’s and I found a decent amount of info on doing so using JSFL. But I was in a hurry and just glancing through all the info I could find, it seemed like a pain in the ass to setup and get working. That’s when I came across Greg Ferrell’s “A Better Batch Publisher” extension for Flash CS3. I had never before used extensions with any Adobe program so this was new for me. But from what I can tell, it is just a fancy plugin for Adobe products. This extension added a menu option under the Command file menu to Batch Publish. The options with this extension include selecting an entire folder of FLA’s and sub-folders of that one that might contain FLA’s. The other wonderful thing is that you can choose if it publishes the SWF only, uses the individual FLA publish settings, or you pick a folder to publish that FLA’s SWF to.
I can’t seem to find this online anymore, so I don’t know if this guy just doesn’t have a website or I just can’t find the right Greg Ferrell to give proper credit for making such an awesome extension for Flash. Thankfully I made a back-up for myself and I will share it with you from my server. You can download it here. Now if you noticed I said that it was made for Flash CS3. Don’t worry if you are running CS4 or CS5. I have tested it out on CS3, CS4, and CS5 on a Mac and it works with every version of Flash, CS3 and beyond so far. Now, I haven’t tested it on a Windows version of Flash, but I do not see why it wouldn’t work. If anyone ever finds Greg’s website or any web presence, let me know so I can give him the proper credit by linking to him. Thanks and enjoy.
Jul 25
I have recently finished my second Adobe Air application, Media Player. Media Player is a basic video playing application to watch FLV’s, F4V’s, and many other video formats as long as it is an H.264 video with AAC or MP3 audio. I am a huge movie guy and one of my real loves for Flash is its video playback capabilities and being able to create something with it. I hope what Flash can do with video in the future expands even more because right now the options with video that isn’t coming from a Flash Media Server is limited to how it can be manipulated. One thing you will notice is if you try to scrub the video, it may jump once you release the mouse, this is a thing with Flash because it can only scrub or move to the closet keyframe in a video and not individual frames. If the video source is from a Flash Media Server, then frame-by-frame scrubbing would be possible. That is one of the things I am hoping will be updated. Please feel free to request for features or report any bugs that you may find that I never encountered in development.
Also if there are any other Flash/Flex developers that are reading this and know of how to work with DRM videos such as iTunes bought movies, I would love to include that as a video type that Media Player can play. I can’t seem to find a whole lot of info online about it and the Flash Help just provides bullet points on what to do for DRM files but provides no examples.
Sep 11
After it being out for many, many months for Flash, I finally decided to start learning some ActionScript 3.0 and convert. The reason I haven’t done so before now I didn’t think it would catch on because of the complexity of it in comparison to AS2.0, but I was wrong on many levels. I also thought it would be difficult to change over with the number of changes involved, but it has actually been a whole lot easier then I thought it would be. I am enjoying working in it so far with a little bump in the road here and there while having to unlearn a few AS2.0 methods.
One thing that I am really loving about AS3.0 is its speed. It really is 10 times faster in some cases and it just shows how a new compiler and hard work from the Adobe team really pays off. Great job Adobe.
One complaint that I have right now is a few things when it comes to the actions panel. There are some glitches with AS2.0 when you are coding in Flash 9. And this is just a personal preference/opinion, I don’t think it should allow ActionScript 2.0 code to be written or give code hints while in an ActionScript 3.0 document. Besides those two complaints, Adobe has really put out a great product and I look forward to see what they do next.
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Aug 21
Big announcement today for Adobe. Starting today you can download a beta update to the Flash 9 player that provides support for H.264 video and High Efficiency AAC audio codecs. This is great news as the H.264 codec is a great choice for video encoding and will provide a more crisp and clean video viewing experience through the Flash player.
Right now, Adobe is offering the beta for developers and consumers to test out and provide some feedback to the new enhancements offered by the h.264 codec in the Flash player. Some of the new features with this update are Multi-core support for vector rendering, Full screen mode with hardware scaling, and Flash Player cache for common platform components, such as the Flex framework.
Here is the link to the article on Adobe Labs.
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Apr 17
Adobe has announced that Creative Suite 3 (CS3) Design and Web editions have started to ship out.
Adobe’s Creative Suite Production and Master Collection are not yet shipping as they await final releases of Adobe After Effects CS3 and Adobe Premiere Pro CS3. Both After Effects and Premiere Pro were released as public betas today from Adobe Labs website and can be downloaded now.
