martijndevisser.com

MAX 2005 Flickr set

Monday, 10. 24. 2005  –  Category: Flash

It took a while, but I finally found some time to upload the pictures I took during the MAX 2005 Conference in Anaheim, California. Some of them were taken with my phone, so the quality of those pics may be a bit low. Anyway, enjoy!

My personal favourite is one of the slides Gary Grossman showed [...]

AS3: Hello World!

Sunday, 10. 23. 2005  –  Category: Flash

There is this superstition that you should always create a “Hello World” program before anything else when learning a new programming language. So I did for ActionScript 3.0 and if you’re lazy, feel free to download the source code from my blog and compile your own Hello World! sample before it’s too late!

package {

import flash.display.TextField;
import [...]

MovieClip.scale9Grid example

Wednesday, 09. 21. 2005  –  Category: Flash

Another cool new feature in Flash Player 8 that hasn’t got a lot of attention yet (probably due to the overwhelmingly sexy filters stuff is the ability to scale MovieClips in a much more intelligent way.

The new scaling mechanism is called scale9Grid and it’s implemented as a new property of the MovieClip class. [...]

flash.external.ExternalInterface example

Friday, 09. 16. 2005  –  Category: Flash

An exciting new feature introduced with the Flash 8 Player is ExternalInterface. This feature allows you to communicate seamlessly between Flash and its container, usually the browser. I put together a simple example to demonstrate how ExternalInterface works.

Basically, ExternalInterface.call enables Flash to call a function in Javascript, while Javascript can just as easily access functions [...]

Why crossdomain.xml is a good thing

Thursday, 07. 28. 2005  –  Category: Flash

I regularly encounter Flash users as well as clients that wonder why the Flash player implements a cross-domain sandbox security model using policy files named crossdomain.xml. I drew 6 simple diagrams that demonstrate its use.

As you can see in the slides below, a malicious user could steal data from your LAN. This is made possible [...]

Timer class 0.3

Thursday, 07. 7. 2005  –  Category: Flash

Just a quick note to let you know that I updated my Timer class to version 0.3. Most important update is loop progress reporting. This is now off by default, as that feature may get quite CPU intensive.

In order to report progress, the Timer needs to send events on each internal loop check, which, [...]

Flash & visitor statistics

Friday, 07. 1. 2005  –  Category: Flash

When developing Flash based sites, you’ll quickly discover that the regular visitor statistics tools don’t work, as Flash doesn’t request plain HTML pages, but dynamically loads .swf and .xml files, depending on user interaction.

In order to be able to track what your visitors are doing in your Flash site, you need to call stats-triggers from [...]

Flash / JS communication: some solutions

Thursday, 06. 9. 2005  –  Category: Flash

A few days ago Macromedia released their Flash / JavaScript Integration Kit (currently in beta). I’ve been working on reliable and flexible Javascript to Flash events and vice versa myself. I already developed a way of queueing getURL calls from Flash to Javascript. Today I’m releasing a method of queueing calls from JavaScript to Flash.

So [...]

Queueing getURL calls

Tuesday, 06. 7. 2005  –  Category: Flash

When building Flash applications that quickly call getURL in succession (for state updates, statistics reports, opening HTML popups), Internet Explorer sometimes tends to completely drop some calls or even clear its own loading queue. Other browsers like Firefox and Safari don’t seem to share this behaviour.

For example, when your Flash application is embedded in an [...]

JavaScript events in Flash: Now for Mac

Wednesday, 04. 6. 2005  –  Category: Flash

Two weeks ago I posted my ExternalFunction class, which allows you to generate EventDispatcher events in Flash through Javascript. As one of my visitors pointed out, this solution doesn’t work on Safari. So I wrote a different implementation, which also supports Safari on Mac OS X.

This new version is based on the method developed by [...]