Monthly Archives: December 2005

HelpPanel 1.1 plugin for FlashDevelop

Hot on the heels of my first release, I’m giving you another. As you may notice, I changed the name of the plugin from FlashHelp to HelpPanel. Mainly, that’s because I’ve expanded the plugin to include sources other than the main help files and LiveDocs. Additionally, it matches the naming scheme of the other FD plugins, which I think is a good practice to follow.

What’s new? Well, now you can add (and remove) custom search locations. Local folders work just like the regular help search, and online locations will do a Google search just like I set up with the LiveDocs. I also gave the interface a slight makeover, and I added better support for non-English systems. Head on over to the FlashDevelop plugins page and pick it up.

FlashHelp Plugin 1.0 for FlashDevelop

I just finished up the first release of a help plugin for FlashDevelop. I started things out by focusing entirely on searching for content. Once I’m sure search is stable, I’ll look into adding more functionality. The plugin automatically detects if the Flash help files are on the system. If they don’t exist, it will open a browser and search the LiveDocs. Of course, you can choose to search either location if you wish. Help file detection works for both Flash MX 2004 and Flash 8.

Behind the local help search is a nice little HTML searching class that uses weights to determine the top result. For every time a search word appears in the document, the weight increases. Words appearing inside certain tags, like <title> or headers, will receive larger weights. The algorithm runs pretty quickly on my system–usually only taking a few seconds to return the results, which is comparable to the help search in the main Flash IDE.

The included DLL is compiled against PluginCore from FlashDevelop 2.0 Beta 7, so it may not work correctly with a different version. The source is included if you want to recompile for a different version, or you’re looking to play around. You can download the plugin and source.

Next version of Flash player for Linux

Just read the word straight from the source, Tinic Uro. The next version of Flash player to appear on Linux will be 8.5. I know your average Slashbot could care less, and thinks Flash is just an advertising devil, but I don’t doubt many others have been waiting for another release.

I think this is a good choice. I’ve heard version 7 of the player is pretty buggy, so I know I wouldn’t want to dig into that code again just to churn out our friend, the 8-ball. Tinic says that they’re compiling 8.5 with the open source compiler gcc. Between that and Eclipse, it looks like someone’s a big open source fan over there. Either that, or they’ve realized that if they want Flash to become even more cross-platform, they’ve got to standardize as much as possible or they’ll be drowning in the zillions of tools and compiler oddities, and who knows what other muck.

FlashDevelop

If you haven’t checked out FlashDevelop, I highly recommend giving it a try. It’s a lightweight Flash editor written in C#, and I recently switched to it for all my AS2 development. Don’t get me wrong, I like Eclipse a lot, and it allowed me a lot of freedom compared to the main Flash IDE, but after playing with FD for a while, Eclipse feels like a 500 ton elephant. FD is quick, and includes most of the features a developer using FAMES is used to.
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Updated EventManager Includes Mixin Support

Many people prefer the quick way that EventDispatcher can set up an object to handle events. With one line of code in an object’s constructor you can have an EventDispatcher instance ready to go, plus all the add and remove interface functions will be added to the target object. I’ll admit, it’s pretty elegant.

EventDispatcher.initialize(target);

I’ve updated my EventManager class with the same functionality. Obviously, the implementation is different, but the interface is the same, so all you have to do is call the static function initialize and you’re ready to go. Everything else should work the same way as the previous version. If you use the mixin, an EventManager instance is automatically set in the _eventManager variable of the target object, but initialize also returns the same object if you’d like to assign it elsewhere.

Download a ZIP of the source files for version 1.1!

Flash AIM Demo

Update: Be sure the check out my second Flash AIM demo with additional features.

Just tossing some code on my blog isn’t the best way to get people excited about it. People want something tangible, something that they can actually play with. As a result, I worked feverishly over the last couple days to get a decent interface for my AIM classes. As I mentioned last time, this is all written in Actionscript 3 for the preview release of Flash Player 8.5. It will not work in Flash 8 or below. If you don’t want to get the player, here’s a screenshot of the new interface in action:

Flash Actionscript 3 AIM Demo Release 1

For those of you ready to take the plunge, you can get it from the downloads section. Due to Flash’s security policies, this swf must be run from your local computer. I’m also warning you that there could be some bugs in there. I tried to find as many as possible, but I don’t doubt that some slipped by me.

Followup: More about Inspectable

After getting some other work done today, I continued my search for the cause of the major instabilities I’m having with Flash. Last time, I tried to simplify things by creating a blank symbol and setting the class in the Component Definition dialog. Today, I took that a step further. I created the same class, but the class only contains public variables that are Inspectable. Every variable matches an Inspectable getter/setter combo from the original class. You can’t get much simpler than that.
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