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);
}
}


What I've done

So.. time to show off some actual results of my work I suppose. The idea is to publish new projects as they emerge. But as some old Chinese dude once said: «Things Takes Time». In layman's terms that about sums to: "I haven't got anything new to show you just yet". In the meantime I'll present thee with some "old" projects in which I have held the part of developer. Note that these projects where not created solely by me, I merely did the development part of it. To read more about some of the people involved in making these projects please visit Voyagedigital.com.
Due credits also to Kjartan over at madebykjartan for his exquisite web-design in the «lenka» project. There are many more I'm sure..please don't sue me or go into a wild rampage if I forgot to mention your name ;-)

Freia 2007
This project was developed by using Flash 8 and ActionScript 2, which where the cutting edge at the time. I know, hard to imagine AS2 cutting anything whatsoever.. Anyway, some of the features included a totally physics driven ragdoll game, where the purpose was to avoid enemies and win the princess. Hey! It's not original, but darn tutting cool. Click here to watch it live.

Lenka (The Chain)
A project with a goal of actually helping people, which was a real inspiration. This was my first Actionscript 3 project and therefore one should be kind in evaluating it's effectiveness and robustness!
Thinking back, this project should have been done using Flex, but we ended up doing it in the first release of Flash 9. Smart? Well.. But hey.. it still rocks! (offline)

Menn og kreft 2006 (Men and chancer)
This was done in Flash 8 and AS2, and boy did this project get fat. Tons of cartoons loading and cellular services adjoined by a fully fledged online video editor with exporting features. Basically we worked our collective asses of making it, and by golly it's slow to load..but still, it's worth it.. mostly because of Runes (The Art Director) way cool character design. Watch it live here.

Menn og kreft 2007(Men and cancer 2007)
The project was a followup to the project above, only this time Rune had hatched a completely spanking new and exiting idea. «How to live life», as told by a cartoon midget with a sassy attitude. This time done in Flash 9 and Actionscript 3, much more smooth and lightweight that the previous year. And to top it off, the amazing "kick my ass" game. It's the black button in the middle.
Click here to watch Steinar go bananas


That's some of them. Sorry they're all in norwegian, but still, you don't have to read the text you know. Well, I'll be back with more incredibe nerdy stuff at a later moment in time.