calm in the chaos

Long time no read. Been busy with a large Flex project, plus I’ve been trying to see a bit more of Europe - but thought it was about time to get back onto some blogging. That and I’ve come up against something that I can’t seem to figure out (and it doesn’t look like anyone else has either from the amount of Googling I’ve done looking for a solution).

Basically what I’m doing is loading an swf with an image in it, which loads over the top of another swf which has some navigation elements in it. What is occurring is the swf on top is preventing any mouseover events from reaching the buttons below the image. I’ve zipped up a test archive to try and illustrate what’s going on. If you run test2.swf, and then mouseover the part of the orange square that intersects the green square, the green squares mouseover event should fire. I’ve set mouseEnabled = false on the orange square, but the fact that it’s in a completely different swf seems to mean that this doesn’t have any effect. The part of green square underneath the orange square is simply not receiving any events.

I’m actually using the Gaia framework, so it’s doing all of the loading of the swf’s. And I thought possibly setting the ApplicationDomain of the swf’s to be the same would mean things would work - but it didn’t. So if anyone’s experienced overlapping assets in two different swf’s interfering with mouse events then please let me know in the comments below.

Either I’m going slightly mad or casting using the “as” keyword works differently to the old way of casting.

Here’s some code to illustrate:

showFormItem = (((e.target as CheckBox).selected as String) == _local.displayTriggerValue[i]) ? true : false

showFormItem = (String((e.target as CheckBox).selected) == _local.displayTriggerValue[i]) ? true : false

WTF?!

I’m pretty sure I’ve got my brackets in the correct spot.

Yhelp!

I just checked out the latest Flash Player release candidate and was interested to see that the file size of the Mac and Linux versions are over 5.45Mb and 3.8Mb respectively. The PC version is still under 2Mb (which is very small for what it’s now capable of).

That got me to thinking about a few things. What were the average player sizes for the last few Flash Player releases? This led me to the Flash Player Archive page on the Adobe site. I downloaded the Flash 7, 8 and 9 archives and got to knocking up a quick average of the player sizes. Rather strangely there’s Linux releases in the Flash 7 archive but none in the Flash 8 archive (which I later discovered was due to there being no Flash Player 8 for linux per se as they went straight to 8.5)

Here’s the rough figures:

Note: I’m using the .zip, .exe, .hqx, .dmg or .tar.gz size not the actual size of the player inside the archive. Obviously this isn’t terribly scientific but I wanted to get a general guide to the increase in size of the actual single file end users have to download to install a player.

* There was a 300Kb decrease in size from the initial release to the final release of this version of the Player

So that brings up a few questions. Why is the Flash Player 10 Mac release so much bigger than the Flash Player 9 one? Is there a lot more code optimisation still to do for this release?

The Linux version also seems to be getting bigger relative to the PC version. Is this because the PC version can utilise functionality already available to it in Windows, or…?

Is there a magical size that if the Flash Player were to exceed, users would be less inclined to download it? Or even if the Player was 10Mb it would still have the same penetration it currently enjoys?

Lots of things to ponder, and comments to make!

I’ve been a bit busy over the last few months. Here’s what I’ve been up to…

I’ve moved to the UK
I’ve travelled home again for a family reunion
I’ve read a good portion of Moock’s Essential ActionScript 3.0
I’ve drunk more Guinness than I care to (or can) remember in Ireland
I’ve sold a car
I’ve worked on my first AS3 site
I’ve used the Gaia Flash Framework

The last point is obviously what I’d like to delve in to a bit more.

For those of you that aren’t aware (like myself about 3 months ago) what the Gaia Flash Framework is, you can find out more at Steven Sacks comprehensive website - http://www.gaiaflashframework.com. I only stumbled upon the Framework as a result of someone else (can’t remember who it was now, but thanks!) posting about it on their blog.

In essence it’s a Framework that takes a lot of the leg work out of creating page based Flash sites. By Page based I mean sites that have a fairly standard navigation hierarchy. It can be used for more complex projects, though I found I struggled against the Framework more than it helped me some of the time.

The project I decided to use it on was for the SBS Australia Documentary website - mY Generation

The main issues I came up against in using the Framework for this site were the following:

• I couldn’t have two pages loaded on the screen from separate branches at the same time. So If I wanted a video from one section to remain visible on screen while the user navigated to the “TELL A FRIEND” section I couldn’t do this due to the way pages have to unload if there not part of the parent page node
• Using the transition engine, although powerful, quickly became very convoluted and confusing when testing the preloading of pages and assets. Though I suspect I found this as the Framework wasn’t quite suited to this type of project
• The file size of the entire project was larger than I would’ve preferred as each page had to have it’s own swf associated with it. This meant not easily being able to share assets like fonts amongst pages. This was partially addressed in later versions of the Framework, so I will have to see if I can utilise this functionality next time around.
• Later on in the project new releases of the Framework became available that significantly changed the implementation of some of the Frameworks features. This made it very difficult for me to upgrade and get the benefit of the bug fixes that were made

On the up side, it’s author Steven Sacks mustn’t spend a great deal of time sleeping as he seems to hold down a full time job whilst at the same time rapidly releasing new versions of the Framework and responding with very lengthy and informative posts on the forum. The documentation is also very good, though there were a few things missing which threw me for a loop (though most users probably wouldn’t have experienced the same issues as I was pushing the boundary’s of what the Framework was capable of). The documentation also gets updated very frequently with issues that users are experiencing in the forums.

I didn’t get to use the SEO capabilities of the Framework, but am finishing up my “new” (it’s been 2 years in the making) website now and am contemplating porting it all across to Gaia just for this 1 feature.

So check out the Framework, check out the SBS site, and let us know if you’ve had any experience with Gaia.

Did a little comparison today of the AS2 components versus the AS3 components. Here’s what I found:

I also note that there is no AS3 component equivalents for the AS2 Accordian, Alert, DateChooser, DateField, Menu, MenuBar, Tree and Window components. What is the plan for these rather useful missing components? Or are they seen as being Flex related so are no longer released with the Flash IDE? Can someone shed some light on how we can get access to these missing components?