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Google to Flash: Game over, man! Game over!

2008-07-01T18:01:58Z

Set up your sentry turrets, because google is coming for your flash content. Sure, it'll look fine after the initial pass. But just let it gestate a few days and the innards of your flash movie will be splayed all over the place.

It really remains to be seen how this new development from The Company Google will affect us flash developers. In some ways, it could be bad -- imagine an instance where only some of the text is embedded but not necessary representational. Yeah, yeah, it'll index data calls as well, but still, you should probably stick to some good ol' SEO best practices for now... On the other hand, it probably spells relief for clients, which can only mean more work for flash devs everywhere... and disaster for Earth.

Out.as to rest of world: Are you not entertained?

2008-06-24T19:40:56Z

We at squidder wanted to highlight an oldie, but goodie, package, from our heros over at Big Spaceship labs. Out does just about everything you might want a logging tool to do, including the ability to exclude certain classes from speaking out at will.

Strength & honor, Big Spaceship. Strength & honor.

Dear SWFMacMouseWheel, will you marry me?

2008-06-13T17:38:05Z

The mad genius over at PixelBreaker has come up with a really clever javascript/flash hybrid implementation of the mouse wheel for mac. And to top it all off, integration with SWFObject is already done. Seriously, SWFMacMouseWheel, ring is in the mail.

Exclude actionscript bytes, avoid hurt feelings

2008-06-03T14:11:02Z

Here's a cool one: Matthew Tretter over at ex animo has come up with a particularly clever way of using JSFL to avoid redundant actionscript bytes when building complex applications by excluding actionscript classes (which you could easily do in AS2, but not so easily in AS3). Well played, jasofel, well played.

Beware scrollRect: Seems great, can be nightmare.

2008-05-28T13:22:42Z

We here at squidder have a love/hate relationship with scrollbars. Partly because, while seemingly simple, they can overly complicated very quickly.

So when we wrote our latest scrollbar class, we decided to try out scrollRect. Seemed pretty strait-forward -- just pass in a rectangle and it takes care of all the masking, offset and everything. Way more efficient than setting a mask and then moving that about... or so we thought. (cue dramatic crescendo)

]]> The big problem arrises when you want to change the size of the content (say a text field) and you want to update your scroll bar accordingly. Any height (or width) measurements you make return the value of the scrollRect rectangle (including getRect and getBounds). And the kicker is that if you unset the scrollRect, it takes a full frame before you can measure the real height again. So there's no way to make an instantaneous measurement and update the scrollbar without a lag. Imagine our rage!

Once we found and punched a couple of monkeys, we pulled a totally bogus hack, which is to reset the scrollbar and pass in the textHeight of the textfield we were scrolling. This of course limits the usefulness of our class, as we can only scroll textfields instead of any displayObject we want.

The truth is out there. We're still looking for answers and will update if we find it (and if you know, definitely pay it forward). But be warned that scrollRect may wind up causing more frustrations than it's worth.

FreshAirApps.com: a breath of fresh, uh, air.

2008-05-13T21:11:13Z

A lot of people really haven't figured out the best use for AIR apps yet, and we at squidder are no different. Most of time, an online app will let you get away with most everything that you want to do. Personally, I think the infatuation with AIR comes from a desire for flash developers to feel more like 'real' developers (zing!).

No, seriously. One of the best ways to see what to do (and what not to do) is to just take a look at what other people are doing. And there may be no better place to do that than at freshairapps.com. Regular expression checker anyone?

And yes, I feel bad for writing that headline.

SWFAddress plus mod_rewrite = SEO bliss

2008-05-01T18:45:45Z

We at squidder often talk about the best way to bring SEO and accessibility to our flash work. And in many ways, the work is simple when you add in fancy tools like SWFObject -- just spit out the content you want to appear to a search engine in the div that gets overwritten!

But what if you've got an extremely complex site, with many sections, pages and drill downs that you want to make accessible? One option is to simply spit out all the content, no matter how long, into that same div. Yes, that will get indexed by search engines, but not only does it make the page you're loading very large, it also doesn't link users directly to the content they searched for.

That's where SWFAddress and mod_rewrite come in. Full deets after the jump.

]]> Let's look at our tools:

SWFAddress, as you may know, is an OUTRAGEOUSLY awesome javascript tool that works in tandem with SWFObject to allow for deep linking and use of the back/forward buttons in the browser.

mod_rewrite is an apache module that basically lets you parse out elements of a url as variables instead of the folder structure that they appear to be.

So let's put them together.

Let's say you've got a flash application set up for selling music. There is conceivably a huge amount of information that you would want to make available to search engines, but there's no way you could output all the information on one page.

Instead, you set up a "fake" directory structure using mod_rewrite that might look like this:

yourmusicapp.com/alternative/wolf_parade/apologies_to_the_queen_mary/

So everything after the first "/" is parsed and used to return an html page with the track listing and album info for Wolf Parade's album "Apologies To The Queen Mary".

Similarly, if you went to "/alternative/work_parade/", you would get html of links to all of Wolf Parade's albums and a description for the band. Go futher down to just "/alternative/" and you'd get links to all the alternative artists and if you just went to "/" you'd get a links to all the genres.

So now we've set up a structure that can easily be indexed. But now how does that allow us to get into the flash?

If we call the above links "hard urls", then "soft urls" would be urls that you pass into SWFAddress for deep linking -- basically anything that occurs after the "#". So the soft url of the example above would be:

yourmusicapp.com/#/alternative/wolf_parade/apologies_to_the_queen_mary/

The flash is then set up as such that when it receives the value above from SWFAddress that it automatically goes to the album view for "Apologies To The Queen Mary".

Now the final step: using javascript, you can automatically forward users with flash who are led to the "hard urls" to the the "soft urls". So someone who searches for "Wolf Parade" in google would get back:

yourmusicapp.com/aternative/wolf_parade/

If the viewer is a search engine, they'll be stopped here and just index the information about wolf parade. But if its a viewer with flash installed, they'll be seamlessly redirected to the flash application:

yourmusicapp.com/#/alternative/wolf_parade/

Conclusion

Our next step is to get a public example of this for people to take a gander through. SEO solutions of this caliber for flash are great for both developers and agencies as it lets us alleviate some fears that clients may put up to going with flash. It's not for every project -- you'll probably need control of the back end development as well as the front end -- but when you find the right one, you'll know it.

Also, keep in mind that you don't actually need mod_rewrite to pursue a solution like this - you could generate the hard urls as actual html files instead of generating them on the fly, which, if your music store was getting a ton of traffic, might be a better plan anyway. The important thing is coming up with a url structure that is mirrored in the both the hard urls and the soft urls.

Finally: if you haven't heard "Apologies To The Queen Mary", do yourself a favor and get it. I'm not going to say that if you listen to it backwards while reading this post, you'll find a super secret message... but you never know.

Dictionary + Timer = Delicious

2008-05-01T16:31:08Z

I encountered a problem yesterday in attempting to instantiate many (5-30 ish) timer objects while needing to provide each with a unique parameter. The ez solution? Create a dictionary object with whatever arguments you need to pass to your timer. Then add your timer to the dictionary. Once your timer is up, simply look up the dictionary definition for your timer event's target. Here we go:

private var dictionary : Dictionary = new Dictionary();

private function yourFunction(x:Number : void {

var timer:Timer = new Timer(500,1);

dictionary[timer] = x;

timer.start();

timer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, callBack);

}

private function callBack(e:Event) : void {

trace("!! my parameter = " + dictionary[e.target]);

}

New 3d platform: so beautiful, should have sent poet.

2008-04-25T14:43:17Z

The new Alternativa3D platform needs to be seen to be believed.

This kind of stuff makes me love flash and at the same time never use it again. Excuse me while I go weep quietly to myself.

Stop. You had me at TransformMatrixProxy.

2008-04-24T13:42:45Z

We at squidder have a total actionscript crush on Jack over at GreenSock. He continues his run of amazing classes his TransformMatrixProxy class, which performs some kind of strange voodoo magic using the transform.matrix property to let you tween skewX, skewY and more.

To get access to this awesome class, you'll need to join Club GreenSock. 50 scoots gets you these goods and more.

Faust: Use flash, skip deal with devil.

2008-04-23T16:21:58Z

We're late to the game as usual on this one, but if you've ever had a client who wanted MAXIMUM standards complacency and compatibility, its time you checked out Faust flash augmenting standard, evangelized by the future-loving folks over at space150.

Basically, its a really clever way of passing the content that you're overwriting when you use SWFObject directly into the flash. Super clean and requires only one data call. Handy for things like navigation bars, which while fancy in flash, can also easily be viewed (and indexed) without flash. Hats off, space150, hats off.

Cool kids love fast cars, SnapToPixel flash extension.

2008-04-14T21:12:37Z

A universal truth of flash is that stuff just needs to be on pixel to look good. Sometimes that's a total pain in the butt. You may get handed a flash file by someone who doesn't realize the importance of the rounded number, or you may just forget until its too late.

That's where you can play it like the Fonz and use our SnapToPixel flash extension. Written in JSFL (or jasofell, if you prefer), the command lives in "Commands -> SnapToPixel" and quite simply runs through all the keyframes on each layer and makes sure each object, text or movieclip is on pixel.

Keep in mind that this will not work on strait-up shapes because of the way jasofell treats them. There also may be a little hankiness if your object is rotated at all (at which point, snapping to pixel won't matter anyway).

Originally written a year ago, we've updated to work correctly with CS3. You can check it out at our google code page. And, if you're so curious, you can see the outrageously simple source code in our squidder svn.

The coolest thing you'll see today

2008-04-14T18:16:39Z

We at squidder love all manner of technology, not just flash. Like wii remotes. And Johnny Lee. And you should too. If you haven't seen this stuff, be sure to check out the video above.

It'll be the coolest thing you'll see today. More Johnny Lee's wizardry can be seen at his site.

Users to Adobe: "make some noise", "raise the roof"

2008-04-11T19:13:31Z

If there's one thing that could be a ton cooler in AS3, its the audio capabilities. Yeah, we've all had fun making spectrum analyzers, but that was back in the hazy, drug riddled days of 2007. This is 2008 and 2008 demands better audio stability and features.

That's where the "Adobe, MAKE SOME NOISE" (sic) campaign comes in. Besides yelling at us, the project aims to end the spotty performance of the existing Sound packages, as well as push for some new, and nifty sounding (HA!), features for the next round of flash.

Coke Zero game fun, incorrectly refers to football.

2008-04-11T14:52:42Z

While I don't like to post stuff that you can readily find at the FWA site (squidder awards?), I just caught myself playing with this new Coke Zero game for over 10 minutes. Which is an eternity, really. Of course, you're talking to the guy that seriously can't wait until Line Rider is a DS game.

Overall, the experience does a magnificent job with video and emulating very well that Tarantino, Bobby Rodriguez style (my personal hero. Who else can direct Dusk 'till Dawn AND Spy Kids?). Hats off, too, for reasonable loading times.