The problem is, as with all writing (apart from blogging, which is more or less stream-of-conciousness), it’s very hard to say exactly when to stop revising. I keep thinking of things I could improve … but the chapter was already hideously late. I need to call it a day!

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Show your support (and make any further suggestions) at the bug on Adobe’s Jira.

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I suspected it might be something to do with embedding fonts, so I made a small movie with three views of the same text: a TextField with fonts embedded, a TextArea, and a TextField without the font embedded. Sure enough, the TextArea has the same ugliness as the TextField without the font embedded (click to see fullsize and look carefully at the glyphs) :

What’s going on here? I’ve tried creating a font symbol in the library, instantiating it, using Font.registerFont(), and using the object’s fontName property. No difference.

Can anyone help? Everywhere I look I see similar problems but no solutions …

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We are giving a special, search-engine optimized Flash Player to Yahoo and Google which is going to help them crawl through every bit of your SWF file. This Flash Player will act just like a person would in some cases. It will click on your buttons, it will move through the states of your application, get data from the server when your application normally would, and it will capture all of the text and data that you’ve got inside of your Flash-based application.

That sounds like you can now treat Flash “the same way” as HTML, in the common sense meaning that if you see content as a user, it will be indexed by the search engine; he doesn’t say so (he’s talking about the technology Adobe provided, not the use the search engines are making of it), but you could be forgiven for reading it that way. If I hadn’t already read a more informative article from the Google Webmaster Central Blog, I would have read it that way myself.

We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.

So let’s consider for a moment what that means. Google will see your SWF and any XML data as separate resources. Which presumably means that if I go to Google and type in a passage of text that appears in my Flash site, I will be directed not to the SWF but to the XML file, or the output URL from the backend that delivers the XML - either way, to the end-user, a mess of angle brackets with the content nested in it.

That’s not what I want at all! And I certainly don’t want to start embedding text into Flash movies just so that Google will be able to index it properly. I will need to continue to include data from the backend in the “noscript” section of the HTML, in the same way as previously … except now the two sets of data will in a sense compete with each other.

Until Google fixes this problem, transparent Flash SEO (by which I mean that we can just concentrate on content and not worry about technology) has still not arrived.

On a side note, Peter Elst points out some possible problems that the indexing of SWF content might cause, echoed by Aral Balkan: crawlers following URLs found in SWFs might cause unintended side effects.

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It seems the site that hosted this code has been hijacked and replaced with some “leetspeak” and some awful song about God with the lyrics scrolling past karaoke-style.

I wonder if the full library is available anywhere for developers who have to maintain AS2 code?

Luckily I only needed the Proxy class, which I found somewhere (I’ve uploaded it in case anyone wants it) but it would be nice if it could find a home somewhere. I would be willing to host it, but it would probably be better placed as OSFlash or RIAForge or somewhere.

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I set up a tween using TweenMax, and set an “onComplete” method. Then, after compiling, I noticed that there my method was throwing an NPE. However, instead of just throwing the exception once, it continued throwing it again and again: presumably, every frame. I presume the exception is stopping TweenLite (and therefore Max) in its tracks, and the tween is never removed.

Here is an excerpt from TweenLite (lines 407-410 in the version I have, 6.22) that I think is causing the problem:

if (this.vars.onComplete != null) {
this.vars.onComplete.apply(this.vars.onCompleteScope, this.vars.onCompleteParams);
}
removeTween(this);


Here’s the relevent parts of the stack trace:

TypeError: Error #1009: Cannot access a property or method of a null object reference.
at au.com.cfour.websites.c42008.view.pages.work::ProjectView/::handleExitTweenComplete()
at Function/http://adobe.com/AS3/2006/builtin::apply()
at gs::TweenLite/complete()

(I got this same stack trace in my output panel hundreds of times before killing the SWF.)

I would suggest this simple fix:

try {
if (this.vars.onComplete != null) {
this.vars.onComplete.apply(this.vars.onCompleteScope, this.vars.onCompleteParams);
}
}
finally {
removeTween(this);
}


Should do the trick.

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It doesn’t actually break the official examples, so maybe I’m doing something wrong, but my sites work fine in Safari (and on FF2) and break with FF3.

Mike Chambers notes that there has been a new release of FF3 beta to fix KeyUp events. But, as noted in the comments, the SWFAddress bug is not fixed properly.

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Will Adobe offer a Coldfusion IDE based on Eclipse?

“Having an IDE specifically for Coldfusion development is probably the most-requested features. We do take that very seriously … at the same time we are working on figuring out how we make the code-centric developer of our platform technology successful with Flex. As we move forward, there is a really strong case for including Coldfusion … within our development tools. I can’t say that it’s in the works or not, but I know people want it. Doing something with Coldfusion based on Eclipse is the way we would do it.”

Will a future AIR version allow external applications to be invoked?

“This is one of our most-requested features. The reasons we did not allow is that it … breaks the concept concept of cross-platform deployment. There are workarounds … we haven’t ruled it out for the future, but we want to run that all AIR apps run on all operating systems all the time.”

Flash Player on the iPhone?

“I’ll give you two answers. The iPhone is a product of Apple Inc. We can’t comment on their products. But we would be very excited to see Apple put Flash on the iPhone. To help with that, a few weeks ago, we announced the Open Screen Project.

Flex Builder for Linux? And AIR?

“It’s been in a long slow alpha state on labs … Flex Builder for Mac and Windows relies on some other functionality that’s developed for other products in the company. Our long term plan is to make Linux a supported platform along with Mac and Windows. It’s available on labs in its alpha stage … we hope in the future it’ll be a supported platform, but we’re not there yet.”

Is there a reason PixelBender is written in a C-based language?

“They chose the language that was ECMAScript-based, I don’t know it ended up with the APIs that it has … they were working on it before we merged the companies [Adobe and Macromedia]. As we move forward, there’s probably a really good chance that we’ll start merging that language.”

Is there any hope we’ll see enum support in a future version of ActionScript?

“There is no ActionScript 4 on the horizon … we plan to introduce APIs gradually - there are some new things planned but theres no major changes in sight as yet.”

Are there plans for parity across applications in using AS3 everywhere?

“I’ve heard discussions of them wanting to do that … there’s no definitive answer to that. I’ve heard about people considering using Tamarin in their tools, to replace the other engines we’re using now. It’ll be up to a … team-by-team basis and whether they have the time to implement it. But it makes sense.”

Adobe Labs - has it improved products?

Sorry but that is such a softball question I won’t bother putting the full answer. “Yes Adobe Labs is great, blah blah blah” essentially.

… They’re all piping up to say how great Labs is. Yawn.

All the other questions were about Coldfusion. So that’s that.

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Very interesting; I learned about a lot of things I’d never heard of, like flosc, the Flash OpenSound Control. He explained how multi-touch screens work, in a way that made sense (total internal reflection).

He also showed off use of GPS. But most interesting for me was the Flash and Wiimote stuff (via WiiFlash).

Light sabre demo:

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