Category Archives: flash

Flash on the Beach session notes

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Just a quick post to provide my session slides and links:

Session Slides (pdf)

Links:

http://blog.deconcept.com/swfobject/

http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/
http://exanimo.com/as2/StateManager

Further Reading:
http://blog.deconcept.com/2006/03/13/modern-approach-flash-seo/
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/progressive_enhancement.html

Enjoy! If you were in the session, leave a comment and let me know what you thought of the presentation, and include ways I can make the next one better if you like.

Off to Flash on the Beach

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I’m heading to London tonight (posting this from our plane on the runway… delays suck) for Flash on the Beach.

I’ll be hanging out around London Saturday and Sunday, and heading to Brighton Sunday evening, so if you are in the area be sure to say hi.

UPDATE: Well, after a smooth flight, we landed at Gatwick, waited a bit to get through customs, and then found out Brandie’s new suitcase was missing… all that was left near mine was another bag that was the exact same color and model as hers, but with someone else’s nametag on it.
So we notified the airline, and they will hopefully deliver it when this other person realizes they took the wrong bag.

So then we headed up to London for the night (before heading down to brighton Sunday evening). Well, the first thing I tried to do out of the tube station was get some cash from the cashpoint machine. I put my card in, selected the amount, and when the machine tried to spit my card back out, it got stuck somehow just out of reach. It tried a couple of times to spit it out, but eventually gave up and confiscated my card! The lady in the bank wasn’t helpful at all, and was just plain rude when I told her the machine ate my card.

So, right now the score is UK: 2, me: 0.

On the up side, the hotel we picked in London is very nice, and in a prime location to enjoy a bit of pre-conference shopping and sight seeing, and the airline website says they found our bag and it’s out for delivery… so things should be better from here on out :)

UPDATE (12-3-2006): Well, more than 30 hours after we arrived in London, our lost bag showed up. We got into Brighton this evening around 6pm, and met up with all the other nerds at the hotel bar and headed over to Aral’s house for a little pre-conference party. And HOLY CRAP he has a nice place. He was just moving in so the furniture was very sparse, but the apartment itself was fantastic.

SWFUpload

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SWFUpload is a neat little tool that alows you to use Flash as a file uploader in your web forms. If your users have Flash, the script writes out a Flash uploader, and if they don’t, they get a nice HTML upload form field. Very nice, and it uses SWFObject for the plugin detection + embedding.

This is a great example of using Flash where Flash can do something better than HTML. And doing it in a way that uses progressive enhancement so it doesn’t require Flash. It’s just that Flash makes it better.

SWFAddress

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SWFAddress is a fantastic little utility that allows you to easily add deep linking and back button support to your Flash websites. From the SWFAddress website:

SWFAddress is a small script that sits on top of SWFObject and provides deep linking for Flash websites and applications. In other words it enables the Back, Forward and Refresh buttons of the browser and creates unique URLs with page titles that can be sent over email or IM.

SWFAddress uses the ExternalInterface functionality introduced in Flash Player 8. It has been tested on the following browsers:

* Internet Explorer 6.0 and 7.0
* Mozilla Firefox 1.5
* Safari 2.04
* Opera 9.02

It’s a great little script, and something I’ve wanted to put together for a long time. Even better: It was designed to work with SWFObject, so if you are already using SWFObject to embed your movies, it’s really really easy to just slap in some deep link and back button support.

Go check it out.