UPDATE: Inserting an update at the top after a recent email I received from a software database website. The editor is an idiot and did not bother to read this entire blog post. On brothersoft.com, they grab this Adobe Flash CS# extension from my site since I am providing a download for it and labeled it as my software when it is not. As you will read in the post below, I found this to be an extremely awesome and useful extension of Flash CS#. If you are Greg Ferrell, the creator of “A Better Batch Publisher”, I did not submit this brothersoft.com as my software. They added it on their own, and they took the icon of one of my applications and flipped it upside down. I have emailed them telling them to edit this listing, but it has not yet been done.
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.
