Welcome to flashlibrary.co.uk

Flash Player Uninstaller

If you follow the link you’ll come to page that will allow you to install particular versions of the flash player as well as uninstalling the current version.

This allows you to truly test your flash detection and express install in various circumstances. This surely must be worth doing when creating robust flash websites.

FLVCheck

This is a simple command line tool that lets verify of multiple flv(Flash Video) files so you can be sure they’ll play as expected. This is more important if you are using a third party tool to generate the flv(Flash Video) files.

Incidentally there is a simple rake file in the automation section of the website letting easily run FLVCheck on multiple flv(Flash Video) files at once.

Tweener

This is the successor to MC Tween although it is class based tweening which is much more suited to how I work. It also supports AS3 which will probably prove convenient as people start to migrate to use it.

ASUnit

For any student in Xtreme programming you will be familiar with Unit testing. ASUnit is framework to help you test your code.

I have been meaning to start writing test for my own code so as I start to use this framework I’ll be able to comment more.

There is also the AS2Unit although I think that has shut down now so I would have t advice using ASUnit that has been extended of include AS3.

Papervision 3D

The source code for Papervision 3D flash classes has been freely released. You can download the source code and examples. Even if you don’t use the code it’s worth downloading it to see some of the examples.

sIFR

This combines Javascript and Flash to substitute elements of a HTML page with flash elements. The advantage of this is that you can embed exotic fonts in the flash and have them guarantee they appear on the site as intended.

If the visitor doesn’t have flash no substitution occurs and standard fonts are used. I haven’t had the chance to use it myself yet, but should be using for this site as soon as I get the opportunity to design it.

LiveHTTPHeaders

This is a handy firefox extension simpler to Charles but runs inside the browser. One of the irritations with using flash and external data source is that if it fails it can be a bit awkward trying to discover why. Unless your using a logger or adding text file to the swf. You don’t know if it’s using the wrong, using any path or even if the data source isn’t returning anything. With this little tool you can see all the calls your browser makes. From this you quickly narrow down the problem.

Although I believe the there is a Charles extension for firefox as well.

Potapenko Commands

On: Flash Professional 8

This extension installs 8 commands for flash. Although the commands indicate shortcuts they were not automatically installed for me when I installed the extension. This is easily done by going to ‘edit’ -> ‘Keyboard Shortcuts…’, then select ‘Drawing Menu Commands’ from the commands drop down field. The unfold the commands button. You should see the newly installed commands.

Note: You need to create a new set if you haven't already done so. The default will be 'Macromedia Standard'. Set transformation point to top-left Get all instance names(CTRL+ALT+G) This command returns the instance name of all selected instances at the top level only. I’m not sure how this command is particularly helpful.

ALF - Advanced Library for Flash

Description Extension to the flash I.D.E that allows the user to better search their library assets.

Opinion Whilst the ‘Movie Explorer’ panel in Flash already lets you filter your library by file type this extension has the very nice benefit of allowing you to list (alphabetically) all the linkage name of the movieClips. Being able to list them alphabetically is extremely useful when like be use are attempting to find the movieClip that you have linked to in your code.

SWFAddress - Deep linking for Flash

Provides a template to create a flash website with a functioning URL bar. There are templates for a standard flash version, a MTASC compilable version, a flex version and search engine friendly version.

We were going to use this in a project but in the end didn’t end creating a all flash site so it really wasn’t an issue. I did however create a prototype that used SWFAdress and found very easy to implement.

The templates for SWFAddress use SWFObject for the flash detection. Although you I changed it to use UFO as I was more familiar with using that. It worked fine although you must give include an id parameter with the UFO. Incidentally I have no idea of the benefits of one over the other.

Pixel Tools

Allows you create lines and shapes that are made up of a number of 1 pixel squares. This extension can be used to a pixel pencil and pixel line button to your toolbar. The pixel line tool unsurprisingly allows you to draw pixel perfect lines but it also allows you apply spaces to the line so you can quickly draw pixel perfect dotted lines.

Charles

Allows informatiob about remote calls

Actionscript Development Tool ADT

Eclipse plugin that allows Actionscript text colouring in an Eclipse Authoring environment. As well as a host of other features. This is my preferred Actionscript editing environment.

Incidentally I am very pleased to see that the project has started up again after a long period of hibernation. The further updates promise a better classpath manager and the ability to generate swfs. I hope they continue the work on it and swipe somethings from the Flex framework also on eclipse. To reiterate it’ GREAT that they have started up again with a new website.

UFO

This is JavaScript flash detection script. It has been well maintained and used in numerous of my projects.

It requires minimal code in your page keeping it nice and tidy. It also validates. Bobby Van der Sluis(creator) has written as article:[http://alistapart.com/articles/flashembedcagematch/] about embedding.

Very easy to implement and allows the provision of alternative content if flash or JavaScript are not installed. The ideal flash detection script with the exception that the user must have Javascript installed. This caveat means that you may miss a portion of users visiting your site with flash but not javascript. I wouldn’t imagine that that demographic is particularly large though.

X-Ray

A component that ca be included in your SWF. Connects to separate application allowing snapshots of the current structure of your SWF. Very useful for debugging. The link above is for the Blitzagency but the best place to get X-Ray is OSFlash .

Although I did have difficulties using this when not including the component in the first frame.

On one occasion for some unknown reason X-Ray failed to connect when the .fla was setup in the following way. The component was not loaded in the first frame i.e. When the linkage properties for the component are set to ‘Export for Actionscript’ and ‘Export in first frame’ is unchecked. The first frame was a keyframe with no command to progress the timeline. If you inclue a gotoAndPlay reference in it works fine though. In my case I used gotoAndPlay(“start”).

As much as I like the xray component I do tend to run into trouble when including it, particularly then setting a value for exporting as2 classes at a particular frame. You need set an export frame value to implement a progress loader for your flash movie.

To hopefully assist anyone exporting as2 classes not on the first frame I would recommend the following checks.

• Make sure that ‘Export in first frame’ is not checked on the xray component. I wouldn’t work for me. This might be obvious.

• Including a bitmap image on the time line can break it. I know this is very strange but I’ve saved the .fla with this case but I found including Bitmap on the time line can cause the connection to fail.