Jeff Kamerer, software engineer on the Flash team, wrote a good article back in mid-October about making Flash websites searchable. I wanted to point it out for those of you who may not have heard about it because I regularly get asked about the subject. Unfortunately there’s not a lot of info out there, but we’re working hard to change that. We’re also in the process of working on technical solutions to improve searchability with SWFs by working with the various search engine vendors.

If you’d like to learn more about your current options, check out Jeff’s article on the Adobe Developer Center.

Link

John Nack recently commented that Photoshop CS2 runs around 35% faster on Intel-based Macs (or “MacTels” as we like to call them) running the recent 10.4.8 update from Apple. Apparently Apple made some optimizations to the Rosetta emulation layer that make non-Intel native apps run faster/better.

Out of curiosity, I asked on of our Quality Engineers if he could do some testing to see if there were any improvements to Flash Professional 8 running on a MacTel machine.

He found that startup time remained mostly the same but publishing time was sped up by 10% when comparing 10.4.7 to 10.4.8.

So there ya have it. Flash 8 is 10% faster on MacTel machines now. Just imagine how much faster it will be when we release the Universal Binary version in our next release!

Andy Riley and Adam Helfet-Hilliker from Euro RSCG 4D have written an article on the Adobe Developer Center that explains how to use the Flash authoring tool to create interactive comps for your design.

Using the Adobe Flash authoring tool for comping purposes makes a lot of sense. It all depends on the type of project you are working on and the amount of time you have to do it. In many cases, Flash is well suited for comping any project that includes a high level of interactivity, or any project where you create the final product using Flash—for example, websites, rich media applications, banner ads, forms, demos, character animations, and the like.

Check out the full tutorial here.

Shauna Rempel of the Toronto Star has written an article about how Flash has democratized animation on the web.

Animutation can justifiably be considered the kooky uncle with dementia at the Flash family reunion, although Flash itself has long been considered a poor relation in the animation family.

But it’s a black sheep no longer, says coldhardflash.com founder Aaron Simpson. The software, owned by Adobe Systems, turned 10 this month and it’s all growed up.

“Flash has come into its own,” he said.

Continue reading the article here.

I’ve been doing a lot of research on feature priorities for the next release of Flash, BLAZE, and I’ve been seeing a lot of positive feedback on Grant Skinner’s gProject extension.

I decided to check it out and see what the hooplah was all about. Here’s a quick summary of the extension.

From the product page:

The gProject panel is a robust replacement for the (rather anaemic) project panel built into Flash MX 2004 and Flash 8 Professional. It incorporates a myriad of time-saving features in a tight, easy to use package.

Basically, gProject provides most of the key functionality that the built-in Project panel is missing.

Key features:
- Add all files in a given directory to the project automatically
- Access multiple projects from a drop-down menu
- Automatically open previous project on launch
- Right-click context menu on files
- Multi-mode “Test project” functionality
- Misc utility functions
- Assign keyboard shortcuts to gProject panel functionality
- Create new classes based on custom templates
- Unit testing

Read the full feature list here.

When I installed it and started playing around with it I was amazed at how rich the functionality was. I didn’t know the JSAPI provided such a deep level of access to the tool’s functionality.

My favorite feature is perhaps the simplest of the list, the ability to just point at a directory and have the project panel automatically addall of the files into the project. I’d like to do this in the Project Panel for the next release but I’m struggling with prioritizing Project Panel enhancements over all of the other great things we’re working on. Believe it or not, simple-sounding features like this take up a significant amount of time when you factor in QA testing, documentation, localization, UI work, etc, etc. That said, we may find a way to get it in there.

However, it is not likely that we’ll go to the full extent that Grant has done with gProject so – if you’re looking for rich functionality in the project panel, I’d recommend giving this extension a try.

The guys at Nectarine have posted the now famous Flash 8 animations on their website. You can now watch all 6 episodes back-to-back in a larger format. They also made some very small improvements to the files.

Watch them here: http://www.nectarine.com.au/virtualstudios/flash8/

“Video” – part 5 of 6.

One of my favorite creative agencies, Nectarine of Melbourne, Australia, has delivered again.

Continue Reading »

For those of you who attended my session at MAX 2005 in Anaheim, CA, I have uploaded a zip file containing the files that I used in my demonstration.

These files are for demonstration purposes only and I will provide no support for them. Use at your own risk.

http://www.mdowney.net/downloads/max2005_flash8session.zip [16.9 MB]

* UPDATE – Here’s the slider component (no support provided with this either): download

We are in the process of updating the installer for the Flash Remoting components, as documented in the “Flash 8 emerging issues” technote so it installs the files in the correct (Flash 8) folders. We are expecting to release the updated installer within the next two weeks. If you need to use Remoting now, you can read Peter Elst’s post which describes how to manually install the Remoting components.

We’ve received a lot of feedback from our users that the Flash Player on the Mac is much slower than the Player on Windows. There are a variety of technical reasons for this that I wouldn’t have the knowledge to explain. However – there is good news for Mac users out there…

As Tinic Uro, Principal Engineer for the Flash Player, explains in a post on his weblog, the new Flash Player 8 for the Mac has added support for OpenGL.

From the post:

“So, in essence it means that the Flash Player will use OpenGL on OS X 10.2 or newer to display its content if the machine meets the requirements. This is the direct result of working with some Apple engineers which were really helpful in getting us to be confident with these changes. In addition almost every core rendering routine now has an AltiVec implementation, you should see that when profiling using Shark. We spend a lot of time on this in this release.”

* Note: There is currently a bug (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=298961) in Firefox for the Mac that causes very poor performance. The bug has been logged and is being addressed by the Mozilla team. Until then we recommend that Mac users use Safari for browsing Flash content on the Mac.