LAFlash

I have used express install on many projects without having many issues, but today I ran into an issue that was either making the express install window not display at all, or when it did display, it would not allow the user to click on the OK or Cancel buttons.

The issue seems to be isolated to Flash Player 10.0.45.2, on all browsers, while trying to update to 10.1.53. I narrowed down the issue to setting the wmode parameter to either “direct” or “gpu” for hardware acceleration while using express install.

I’ve logged this in the Adobe JIRA bug base. But I wanted to post my workaround here if anyone is experiencing this issue and is looking for a resolution. To get around the bug I simply wrapped the parameter in an if clause. Hope this is helpful to someone!

<script type="text/javascript">
        <!-- For version detection, set to min. required Flash Player version, or 0 (or 0.0.0), for no version detection. -->
        var swfVersionStr = "10.1.53";
        <!-- To use express install, set to playerProductInstall.swf, otherwise the empty string. -->
        var xiSwfUrlStr = "playerProductInstall.swf";
        var flashvars = {...};
        var params = {};
        params.quality = "high";
        params.bgcolor = "#000000";
        params.allowscriptaccess = "sameDomain";
        params.allowfullscreen = "true";
        // Only set wmode if the right Flash Player is present.
        if (swfobject.hasFlashPlayerVersion(swfVersionStr))
        {
                params.wmode = "direct";
        }
        var attributes = {};
        attributes.id = "MySwf";
        attributes.name = "MySwf";
        attributes.align = "middle";
        swfobject.embedSWF(
            "MyFlashApp.swf", "flashContent",
            "900", "650",
            swfVersionStr, xiSwfUrlStr,
            flashvars, params, attributes);
        <!-- JavaScript enabled so display the flashContent div in case it is not replaced with a swf object. -->
        swfobject.createCSS("#flashContent", "display:block;text-align:left;");
    </script>

After working in Flex for so long I’ve grown used to some of the great utilities that Flex provides. One of the classes I think is very useful during debugging is mx.utils.ObjectUtil. Using “ObjectUtil.toString()” you can very easily trace out objects that you want to inspect the contents of. So I took the mx.utils.ObjectUtil class and modified it to remove the dependencies on Flex framework classes so that it works in AS3 projects only. Not only in AS3 projects in Flex Builder and Flash Builder but in the Flash IDE as well.

Read the rest of this entry →

I recently had a couple of friends ask me some questions about adding preloaders for AS3 projects, so I decided to write up some sample code for adding a preloader to an AS3 project. Read the rest of this entry →

I’ve just added the Flash Builder 4 and SourceMate presentations from the LAFlash April meeting on http://archive.laflash.org.

I posted an example of how you can easily integrate Illustrator artwork into a Flex 4 project, you can read the post on the almer/blank labs site here: http://labs.almerblank.com/2010/04/illustrator-cs5-to-flex4-so-simple/