There I said it.

Everything on the web has a failure point. You can’t play Flash or Silverlight without the plugin. You can’t view any super slick jQuery goodness without JavaScript enabled, and even the totally old skool animated gif file fails to show off its dithered beauty if you have images turned off. So what. Get over it. Do your job, and plan for your site to degrade gracefully, and in the case of Flash, that means providing alternate content for those who have Flash blocked, don’t have the plugin, or for some Paleolithic reason have JavaScript disabled. It doesn’t matter what you are doing, there are great tools out there for creating a solid experience for the people who visit your site.

Banners. Everyone has seen Flash banners, and I think most would argue that alternate content isn’t needed since you don’t want to see them anyway, but listen for a sec okay? We’re talking about developers doing things the right way, not whether or not the people having bucket loads of banners chucked at them want to see them. If you’re using .NET, you can use the adRotator control with one tag, and a simple XML file to rotate between images of the banners. This is a simple solution, and it shows the banners according to how they are weighted in the XML file every time the page is loaded/refreshed. Naturally there are others too, A List Apart has this article for a PHP image rotator.

I recognize that it becomes a lot more difficult when you are talking about full sites developed in Flash, but that really doesn’t matter. Not doing the job right because it’s too much work isn’t a good excuse. Now, I fully recognize that freelancers charge for this time, and clients can be cheap, but I bet they’re going to be pissed when they find out how many people can’t view their kickin’ new flash site. If you only take into the consideration the more than 60 million iPhones, iPods and iPads out there, that’s a huge chunk of people who will get Jack and his buddy Squat when they come to your site.

SwfObject makes it simple to include alternate content, so there’s another reason why you shouldn’t bail on the details. I know, it’s JavaScript, but the thing here is that it degrades to your alternate content so you’re safe using it. I’m not really going to get into how to develop your secondary content, that’s your bag. There’s another benefit too, your information will get indexed more thoroughly if it is in the page when the spiders hit it. Sure Google can index Flash, hell Yahoo can and Bing probably can too, but if you have information in the page, it’s going to grab that first, and it will give it preference. Developing alternate content for your Flash work will also help your search engine ranking, which is important right? I mean you built the site so people would find it and see what’s there, right?

It really just comes down to doing the job right, and not blaming the tools used (or the tools who created the site) used to create the site. Flash isn’t perfect, but it really isn’t the root of all evil either. HTML 5 isn’t ringing the death toll for Flash either, so quit squawking about that too.

You know the scenario, you’re building the coolest Flash project ever to grace the intarwebs, and it has rounded corners all over the place – because, well, rounded corners are cool. Duh!? Anyway…… You publish the file and the corners look like butt, and not just ordinary butt either – hairy Goat butt. ARRGGGGHHH! So what do you do? Check the little checkbox that says hinting, under the line properties.

This little feature simply places all of the line anchor points on whole pixels. Naturally you can do this manually if you are living in the past ( Flash MX I’m looking at you) by making sure all of the edges of your box are aligned to whole pixels, and manually entering in the coordinates. This way is better though, do it the easy way….

See? Told you it was simple.

This is not unlike the grid generator I built late last year, in that I have been trying to find ways to create interesting backgrounds to use as elements for designs. The thing that I like about the camo generator though is that you can easily substitute a unique shape and create a branded pattern pretty easily. Simply by altering a few lines of code, you can change the scale, and rotation of the base shape and viola! You have a unique pattern using your logo or trade marked icon… like… oh I don’t know…. say a Reddit Alien camo pattern. Cool huh?

Here’s the source file too if your interested.

The most interesting part about tools like these is auto-generating things that can be classified as art, or used in the creation of art. Creating artwork by manipulating code; something which many people consider to be a form of art all unto itself; is an idea that I find completely intoxicating. Here are a few examples:

Jared Tarbell created Invader Fractal back in 2003 using ActionScript, and wisely made prints available (something which seems to have vanished). The patterns created here are very interesting and would make a nice edition to just about any cube wall….

Eric Natzke is another amazing artists who utilizes code to facilitate his creative process. Check out his latest work on flickr for an upcoming show in Toronto. Unfortunately I will be in the city about 3 weeks too early to see the opening.

Joshua Davis is another one too. His development, coding, and artistic ability is a trifecta of awesome. I have seen and followed his work since I first heard of him back in the day at a FlashForward conference.

Fractals artwork isn’t hard to find, nor is it hard to figure out why people find it fascinating. A simple Google search reveals a wealth of imagery and some spectacular examples. One of my favorites landing spots is Fractal World Gallery and naturally there’s good stuff on Deviant Art. Here’s a flash app to build and layer fractals as well, it totally aced Firefox a minute ago – so be warned, but it’s pretty cool.

Oops. I sort of went off on a tangent there. For more information on the Ruby Fractal Library, head over to CrunchLife and check Ryan’s post.

I started pretty small, and just tried to build a 100 x 400 pixel grid, and have it timed to see the build. First, I tried using setInterval, but it turned out to be way too slow and pulled too hard on the CPU, so I went back to a good ol' frame loop. It took me a little bit to get back to filling in all of the spots, and then figuring how to complete the grid randomly without duplicating any of the positions. After that I started playing with colors, and randomly creating a variation in the block color at the same time.

I think it's pretty cool and you can check it out here.

I am trying to get beyond just duplicating the desktop and into something that can produce a pattern that is both interesting and unique. Where I want to take it next is two-fold. I want to create another function or set of functions to create an additional pattern on top of the grid, that would ultimately be a shape translated into a grid form or just an outline. The shape would be randomly selected from a set of shapes within the library. Then after that I would like to port  the whole to AS3 rather than AS2 what it is now.

Something else I would like to do is add a Perlin Noise filter to it that would dictate the pattern of the color shift of the grid as it is being built, but that would be after I get it written in AS3, which I have no idea how to do just yet….

Any way, if you are interested you can download the FLA file.

As a side note, the forums and folks over at ActionScript.org have been a great help.

At first glance I am quite sure there was an acute, collective yalp of excitement by the development community – I know I belched a few in my cube at work. But what about folks who have made the mistake of placing sensitive information within their files counting on the obscurity of the Flash file format to protect it? Well, I'll tell ya… they're hosed. Aral Balkin poses the question is indexing revealing too much. My answer to that is no. To quote Aral:

…security by obscurity — which we know is not security at all.

He is dead on here. Even before Google could index even the smallest amount of text with a swf file, there have always been decompilers. In fact, I can remember using one to recover corrupted files as far back as Flash 4, so this has never been good practice.

Google's announcement several days ago alludes to the abilities, and has confirmed that it does or soon will be able to index Flash content placed by dynamic means, such as SWFObject. This is all excellent news for RIA and Flash developers alike – in fact it is one of the things we have been waiting for.  Despite a persistent bias against Flash sites, these types of interactive applications are the future of the web, so it's about time that the major search players get in on being able to read the content – so we as developers don't have to build alternate methods to view the site solely on getting it indexed.

I am interested in playing with SEO and Flash again to be able to tweak the results even further to better enhance the product being delivered to the client and ultimately the end users.

Day Two
Session 1 was led by Seb Lee-Delisle from Plug-in Media in Brighton, and it was top-notch for being early in the morning for everyone. The talk was on Flash pyrotechnics or particle effects and it was cool. Again I left there wondering how I could do something with my new found knowledge and source code. I still have no real idea about how I could use this stuff except in games and to start working on some AS3 experiments of my own, but this is one of those things that I love to get in on. Maybe I will get to build some more games this year….

The next session only added to my headache. The one I wanted to go to was canceled, so I chose a runner-up because it sounded interesting and turned out to be… well… ignorant. I'm not going to go off and slag it, because I am sure the gal who was on stage is a decent developer, but I didn't drive 3 hours and pay the admission to listen to someone piss and moan about their job. Boo hoo…. It might have gotten better, because I heard some dude just ranting about how he loved it, but within the time I was in there – about 10 +/- people left; and I wasn't in the mood to sit through the full hour on the off chance it became more interesting.

The rest of the day was an interesting mix of work from various places around the US mostly – and there was some wonderful work showcased. Day 2 left me wanting a bit though. The previous day was so mentally charging for me that I was hoping for day 2 to be the same way; but I am sure my headache got in the way a bit. It was great to see new works from GMUNK, Joshua Davis though – they are very talented, and it's always good to see what other folks are up to.

The last session I went to for the day was by Buck. This was an excellent sesion too – these guys build some really cool videos. I don't really do a lot of video, nor do I do any 3D (or get the opportunity too) – but as I said above, it's always good to check what other folks are up to. I can get ideas, and quite often do, from other styles or genre of work other than just Flash and Web Design.

After the day was over, I walked around Toronto a bit since I wanted to go up the CN Tower. Holy smokes this thing is big! I was up all the way to the top, and it is pretty freaking cool. I will post some more pics on flickr either tonight or when I get home.

I have yet to totally plan what is in store for me today, so maybe I should shut up and get to it. 

Toronto is a great city too, the 3 or 4 times I have been there have all been awesome.

I have no idea what my schedule is going to be yet, I can't decide so I am just going to figure it out as I go. The best part about these conferences is all of the massively creative people that you get to interact with. I have always feel reenergized every time I come back from one of these. I went to the 2006 FITC, and FlashForward in 2004 – and I am hoping to go to Adobe MAX next year…. Although it is in November, so maybe I will get lucky and be able to do both? Probably not…..

Maybe I will see you there. 

After a bit of searching, I found information about Firefox and Opera having security measures preventing this from working right out of the gate. Okay, but I know sites like Google, Amazon, and countless others have pulled this off – so I know it's possible. My criteria was pretty simple:

copy the source code of a <div> that wrapped the essential content to the clipboard by clicking a button.

That's it; nothing too fancy. The next thing I found was an example of pulling text from a textfield on Jeffothy's Keyings blog. I didn't have content in a textbox though, it was in a <div> – so I altered the code to pull the data using innerHTML.

document.getElementById('sourceDiv').innerHTML;

That resulted in undefined being copied to the clipboard (I'm still not sure why). So back to Google to find some .net examples, but they turned out to be far more complex than what I wanted to use. I knew I could do it with JavaScript though; so I went back the first example. First, I simply set up a function to grab the code and fire an alert.

<script language="javascript">
    function getSource() {
        var sourceData= document.getElementById('sourceDiv').innerHTML;
        alert(sourceData);

    }
</script>

 This worked fine. So the next part was to get it to the clipboard, but I kept running into not being able to pass it to the clipboard function I downloaded from Jeffothy's site – so I added a textarea, and set style display:none. Then copied the code out of the textarea onto the clipboard and viola!

But not quite. IE doesn't like the textarea set to not visible and wouldn't recognize it being there at all (throwing a JavaScript error), so I had to change the style to width:1px and height:1px to get it work cross browsers. 

<script type="text/javascript">
    function copySource(inElement) {
        if (inElement.createTextRange) {
            var range = inElement.createTextRange();
            if (range)
                range.execCommand('Copy');
        } else {
            var flashcopier = 'flashcopier';
            if(!document.getElementById(flashcopier)) {
                var divholder = document.createElement('div');
                divholder.id = flashcopier;
                document.body.appendChild(divholder);
            }
            document.getElementById(flashcopier).innerHTML = '';
            var divinfo = '<embed src="/media/_clipboard.swf" FlashVars="clipboard='+escape(inElement.value)+'" width="0" height="0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed>';
            document.getElementById(flashcopier).innerHTML = divinfo;
        }
    }                                  

    function getSource() {
        var sourceData = document.getElementById('sourceDiv').innerHTML;
        document.getElementById("sourceField").value = sourceData;
        copySource(document.getElementById("sourceField"));
    }
</script>

Now the interesting part about this is the swf file. It is the key to getting this whole deal to work. By using the _clipboard.swf file (originally built by Mark O’Sullivan of http://lussumo.com/), you are able to get the copied code out of the browser and onto the clipboard by passing it to Flash's System class using the setClipboard method. Pretty ingenious really.

All you have to do now is just drop a form in the page around everything you want to copy, and a button and textarea.

<center>
    <input type="button" value=":: Copy to the clipboard  ::" onclick="getSource()" />
</center>
<br />
<textarea name="sourceField" id="sourceField" cols="85" rows="10" readonly="readonly" style="width:1px;height:1px;"></textarea>

 I wrapped it all up in a zip file for those who want to download it.

With what I have been able to work with so far I love it. In fact I wish I had forced myself to make the time a year ago, but the fact is the time wasn't right. I now have several projects looming that will all but require me to be at least familiar with AS 3 before I can even begin them; so I have to now. A lot of the changes in ActionScript 3 are welcome changes to the various quirks that drive me crazy about Flash and AS 2. I have always been in love with Flash and what it can do, but it's been a love hate relationship. The quirks and inconsistencies I would regularly run into would drive me completely off my nutt. I know that will most likely not go entirely away – but it promises to be diminished with this new (ish) version.

I working through Learning ActionScript 3.0: A Beginner's Guide by Rich Shupe & Zevan Rosser and I have to say this is an excellent book. I had no doubt when I bought as I have always had success with Adobe books. There are quite a few concepts that I have been skimming as I am already very familiar with them, but the point was to get a basic, ground up understanding of AS 3. I have other books too, like Essential ActionScript 3.0 by Colin Moock – but this is more what I need to get my head wrapped around it as a whole; which is not a reflection of Colin's book in any way – he's brilliant.

Anyway…. I am working on a new website which will eventually be ported to AS 3 as well as some universal files that I will share when they are done. I am hoping to make some components too, but we'll see how the files go. I want to make a new universal loader to load external swf files using AS 3 and SWFObject 2. As well as a couple others.

 I still have a ways to go yet, but despite that brain-pain, I am enjoying the challenge of starting something new again.