Quicktip: Ducking local security in FlashPlayer

Ever needed to test a swf containing networking residing on your local hard drive? Sure, you can choose to export for only network from the publish menu in Adobe Flash. But what if you need to load some movies locally and then make a connection to your remote server at the same time? Well, out of the box, you can't. But wait, there is a simple solution to allow flash player to do both when playing locally. Only tree easy steps..

1. Open your favorite texteditor(BBEdit, Coda, Textmate..) and create a new textfile. At the first line, type the path of the folder where your project resides, e.g./Users/username/myproject

2. Save the file with a .cfg extension to: /Library/Application Support/Macromedia/FlashPlayerTrust/

3. There is no step 3

Note: You can do this for your entire user account, but I strongly recommend not to do so, cos this will allow not trusted files to run both networking and local command on your computer if you download them. You don't want that.

Briefly: New Layout

So, I decided to change the layout. More mobile device friendly layout, not more to say on that issue

Quicktip: Avoiding popup blockers in AS3

Adobe/Macromedia did change a couple of things as the release of ActionScript 3 became a reality.

For once, it's not as easy as it once was to open an external browser window. There are many solutions to this floating around, many of them involve using the "wmode" parameter in the HTML embed code for the swf. In my opinion this is not a good idea cos it will bring a bunch of new problems with it, like handling textfields and so on. I've written a possible solution for this problem which works using standard embed code in the HTML. It simply tries to use the ExternalInterface, if that fails, it falls back to navigateToURL. Hey, remember to import ExternalInterface, URLRequest and NavigateToURL in order for it to compile properly.

private function openURL(url:String, window:String = "_blank") : void {
var WINDOW_OPEN_FUNCTION:String = "window.open";
if(!ExternalInterface.call(WINDOW_OPEN_FUNCTION, url, window)){
navigateToURL(new URLRequest(url),window);
}
}