Nerdabilly.com

Lately, this blog has been less about Flash and more about me apologizing for it not working.

So here’s an interesting article about Flash and SEO:

Google Reads Flash Text, so Optimize It

This is a huge step in the right direction for Flash. For many years, one of the biggest arguments against Flash was its unreadability to search engines. And really, that was one of the few remaining arguments with any merit.

Now, while I think this is a big win for Flash, I also believe it will be a few years before this makes any difference. Existing Flash sites with no SEO will have to be rebuilt, and sites built by less experienced developers will still probably avoid this altogether.

Also, please note the feed URL has changed.. it’s now http://nerdabilly.com/blog/feed/. I think the GoDaddy ads may be breaking it though so I am searching a more stable solution.

I hope.

Hosting and maintaining this blog has proven to be quite a challenge but this latest go-round should at least provide some stability.

These are the things I could do without.

For the past couple of months, I have been working on a SHOUTCast player app in AIR. When I signed on to do the project, I had absolutely no idea that playing SHOUTCast streams in Flash is a Herculean task. It seems there’s this nagging little memory leak related to Flash loading a never-ending audio stream. Flash doesn’t release the memory for the audio already played, and eventually that audio data just builds and builds and builds until your CPU or memory maxes out. So far, I have found little to nothing in the form of a nice quick solution to this.

That being said, perhaps the most viable current solution was posted at MadArco’s DevBlog . It basically entails streaming the audio for 20-30 minutes, then recreating the audio stream in a new variable, and crossfading the two streams, at which point the original can be released from memory and garbage-collected. It’s a nice idea, but in CS3, after the first couple of swaps, I lost sound altogether, and this problem re-occured no matter which “swapping” method I attempted. MadArco’s solution is in AS2, and perhaps I lost something along the way while attempting to convert it to AS3, or perhaps AS3 isn’t able to handle this particular method.

There’s also a nice explanation of the “swapping” concept here.

So, after even more research (by “research” I mean thinking of new ways to search for a solution in Google) I found a post on FlashBrighton about generating audio and PCM wave data. I also found this on ActionScript.org, about using PHP to create a socket connection to read ID3 tags.

See where I’m going with this?

I’m proposing an all-in-one memory-leak-and-ID3-problem fix ShoutCast solution for Flash. Here’s my thoughts on it so far:

1.) Use Socket for getting the ID3 data, and, if possible, getting the stream as well.

2.) Use the FlashBrighton wave-data solution to create the audio from the ByteArray returned by the MP3 stream. This is possible using the URLStream class.

3.) Distribute it as a component or nice reusable class in order to allow beginners to use it easily.

I made some attempts at this yesterday, but the bytecode stuff is way over my head. If anyone has any input, or would like to have a go at this, please leave a comment and let me know what you think!

I know there has been problems with this before, but the amount of spam I’m getting on a nearly hourly basis has gotten to be too much.

From now on, users must register before adding comments to a post. I’m not going to steal, sell, or otherwise misuse your information, this is strictly a spam-busting measure.

Initially, some users had problems with registering, so please contact me if you experience any problems.

thanks.

-nerdabilly

I've stumbled on another one of those "everyone wants to do it, but nobody knows how" issues in Flash: how to disable the controls on the FLVPlayback component.

After quite a bit of documentation-reading, web-searching, and forum-browsing, I've come up with a function for easy, on-the-fly toggling of controller-enable-ability.

with a FLVPlayback instance on the stage, add the following to your ActionScript:

Now, for a bit of explanation:

The first step is to simply toggle the visibility of the SeekBar handle. With it invisible, there is no way the user can use it, and this seems to be the simplest solution, rather than digging through the MC structure of a component skin and figuring out how that handle is, uh, handled. So, the bEnabled value can double as the visibility value for the handled: true (visible) for enabled buttons, or false (invisible) for disabled.

For the rest of the buttons, it's not so simple. Users have come to expect a "ghosted" or "grayed-out" appearance for a disabled button, so simply removing them as we did with the scrollbar handle would be bad form. Luckily, the pre-made skin SWFs for the FLVplayback component include disabled states for everything, and we can use these.

Because the component skins use bitmap caching and 9-slice scaling to maximize their flexibility, simply setting the button properties to the disabled MC won't work, and it requires a bit more of a brute-force approach to get those buttons to appear. Hence, the onEnterFrame and updateAfterEvent() commands. updateAfterEvent() forces an update of the stage, so it will make those disabled-states appear, but it only works as part of a clip event, such as onEnterFrame. So we wrap the whole thing in an onEnterFrame, and then delete the onEnterFrame function to save on processing and memory.

I should note that I developed this using the SteelExternalAll.swf skin. The documentation indicates that the skins are built using a universal structure, so it should work for any of them, but I'm not making any promises.

Flash, ActionScript, components, video, FLVPlayback

Sorry for the XML parsing errors in the feed and the general slowness of the site. After a lot of back-and-forth with my web host, we determined that the issue was temp files clogging up the cache. I deleted nearly 200,000 files and it seems to run well again!

There are some rare instances, mainly during debugging, where you may need to determine which function called the current function. For example, you may have a function that is repeatedly called at many places in your code, and you need to determine which function calls it at a specific time.

ActionScript provides arguments.caller for this. However, using arguments.caller returns only a reference to the caller function, and leaves out details such as its name, type, etc. Take a look at this example:

The output of this is:

Um, thanks, I guess.

My function was called by a function. This is about as helpful as [Object object] or, my personal favorite, "undefined is not defined."

The trace output is giving us a [type Function] because it's the only way Flash can trace a reference. The way around this is to check the reference against everything and test for equality. Let's add a new function to the above code:

The output has changed for the better:

Presto! You've gotten your caller function's name. The getCaller function is looping through everything in _root. When the loop encounters a function, it is really encountering a reference to that function, just like arguments.caller is a reference to the caller function. Therefore, the if statement is comparing references to references and is able to accurately determine whether the caller property passed to it is the same as an existing function, and then return its name (or, more accurately, the name of the index of that reference in the _root object) as a string.

Please keep in mind, however....

This method is not perfect. I'll admit it. It only works for functions that are defined on a frame in the main timeline. It won't work for anonymous (inline) functions, calls made from a nested object such as a movie clip, component, or class, or outside calls coming in from JavaScript or any other external interface.

None of these flaws are unfixable, and time permitting, I'll work on ways to improve this method, but the basic concept of this code (comparing references) will remain the same.

Flash,ActionScript

A reader commented on my ScrollPane article, saying "why wouldn't they just say that?"

I've found myself asking this question more and more as I've been diving into Flex and ActionScript 3.

For example, here is how to get the name of the root node of an XML object:

AS2:

AS3:

In AS3, nodeName has mysteriously disappeared, and the Migration Guide makes no mention of name() as its new equivalent.

In fact, the XML Class Definition for ActionScript 3 describes name() as "Gives the qualified name for the XML object.", which led me to believe it was relevant only namespace-qualified XML tags and not useful for getting a root node's name.

Splitting hairs, perhaps, but a good little tip nonetheless.

Flex, actionscript, actionscript 3.0, xml

There's been quite a bit of buzz lately about "WPF/E", or "Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere," a code word for Microsoft's newest browser plugin and implementation of their Windows Presentation Foundation. This week, Microsoft released a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of WPF/E. I downloaded and installed their plugin and SDK and decided to see what I could do.

The plugin, and its drawing capabilities, were decidedly Flash-like. However, the documentation led me to believe that the entire "movie" - all the shapes, strokes, motions, and events - must be scripted in Microsoft's XAML language, as opposed to being created in a nice drawing interface such as Flash or Illustrator would offer.

This couldn't be. There is no way your average graphic designer would take kindly to coding all of this into XML. In fact most designers shriek, run away, and hide at the very thought of code. There has to be some kind of GUI to do this if WPF/E is ever going to be taken seriously by the design community.

After a bit more investigation, I found that Microsoft recommends "Expression Web Designer" to develop pages and "Expression Web Blend" for creation of WPF/E objects. Of course, this information was buried, in that special MSDN way of hiding information in plain sight. Initially, the Expression pages said that to use Expression Web Designer, one must first install the .NET Framework 2.0, and then install the designer software, and the Expression Web Blend was no longer available.

So after some more downloading, I installed the framework and Expression Designer, and fired it up to have a look at the latest Macromedia-Killer, which turned out to be a clone of Dreamweaver, with no mention of WPF/E anywhere.

After even more investigation, I found the trial download of Expression Blend, once again hidden in MSDN's own unique way of hiding only the stuff someone might actually want to see, hidden amongst endless blobs of buzzwords and Microsoft horn-tooting. Plus, I now had to upgrade to .NET Framework 3.0.

Another round of downloading and installing, and finally, I was ready to for this ever-so-hyped and cleverly-hidden masterpiece of Microsoft innovation and competition-killing.

What I got was, well, stupid:

I always get a kick out the general assumption that monochromatic gray colors automatically makes you "edgy" and "hip."

Also, I couldn't find any way to change the fill color of the objects I had drawn onto the Stage ...err, sorry, I mean the "Canvas"... The Paint Bucket seemed incapable of its basic Paint Bucket duties.

Scripted events were clumsily assembled in a panel drop-down interface, allowing the user to select first the object, then the event, then the action. For lack of a better example, it reminded me of the email-filtering in Outlook.

On the other hand, I did get an answer to my question: Yes, there is a graphical drawing interface to create XAML for a WPF/E page.

But why would you use it?

wpf/e, microsoft, Flash,wpf

I'm attempting to claim this on Technorati.

Technorati Profile