Make Those SWFs Smaller

I always thought that Flash compression was amazing and it is, but you can compress those SWF files further with Eltimer's Flash Optimizer. The Mac OSX utility program claims to compress SWF files to 80% of their original size. At $99, it might be worth looking into for anyone publishing dense content.

ActionScript 3.0 Migration Cookbook

Adobe is still trying to get Flashers to migrate to ActionScript 3.0. It's so late in the game with this, but their efforts have stepped up now with the ActionScript 3.0 Migration Cookbook. 21 PDF pages of code examples and a list of 5 misconceptions about AS3 and a list of 5 benefits of AS3.

So if you're still AS2, then you'll want to check this out.

Lynda.com has a new Flash SEO course

Lynda.com has a new Flash with Todd Perkins entitled: Flash CS4 Professional: Building Search Engine Friendly Sites. [Login required to view full course.] Perkins starts off with some straight HTML fundamentals and how search engines work. So for the advanced user, you might want to skip ahead.

Al Lemieux
Lemieux Design

Beginner's Guide to ActionScript 3.0

At FlashDen.net, there's a new video series by Doug Winnie titled Beginner's Guide to ActionScript 3.0, which are hosted at tv.adobe.com. It's pretty amazing to me that anyone is producing video's of this, since ActionScript 3 has been around for so long now. I guess there's still a lot of ActionScript 2 development going on out there.

Enjoy.

Flash CS4 Interface

I've been using Flash CS4 for a while now and I'd have to say that the biggest complaint I have is the interface. I understand Adobe's move here, but I feel very restricted by the environment, as if there isn't enough room to get my work done. There still isn't a logical place to keep the Actions Panel, Timeline, and Stage in view. Those, I feel, are the most important panels to me.

Another troubling aspect of this version is the shift in paradigm on the Tool panel. I'm so used to looking for the vertical Tool panel, that sometimes I forget where the tools are. Then actually finding the tools I need to use becomes an issue.

Granted, there are other Workspaces in the Window menu, but they don't seem to suit my needs. What are your thoughts on the new interface?

Dynamic Text Fields

I had a recent issue with Dynamic Text Fields. In an interface I designed, I had a set of button symbols - just simple buttons. I didn't want to put any text labels in the buttons themselves, I wanted the text to come from an external XML file. So I set up the XML file and got the text into a Dynamic Text Field that I had in a layer above the buttons.

The problem happened when testing the movie. The buttons normal behavior was blocked by the Dynamic Text Field?!? For example, when hovering over the button, the cursor stopped being a hand cursor over the text field. Any rollover effects stopped when the cursor was over the text field. So I thought it was an issue with the text field itself, like some appearance property or something. I tried all of the settings and it didn't change anything.

After posting questions to a couple of forums, I finally got the answer. With ActionScript, you need to set the text fields mouseEnabled property to false:

textfield1.mouseEnabled = false;

That means that the text field doesn't respond to mouse events at all. Problem solved.

It seems odd to me that Dynamic Text Fields do this at all. I don't think this was a normal behavior in versions prior to CS4.