At the beginning of this year, when I first heard about A.I.R. I was excited to learn more about it and see what I could do with it. What really jumpstarted my interest was a trip to Cincinnati, OH to the Adobe onAIR Bus Tour. At this point I am full steam excited about working with AIR.

I work on a Windows machine at work and Mac at home, so I am also excited to see cross platform development. One thing that is a little wonky about AIR is the way that you test your applications. Since AIR is built with an SDK instead of a builder application, such as Flash, you have you use the terminal to launch the SDK. So I came up with methods for OS X and Windows XP to use right-click contextual menus to test AIR applications. I will first note that you can use Aptana, Flex 3, Flash CS3, and Dreamweaver CS3 to test your AIR apps, but i thought i would make something for the hardcore coders. Though, I personally use all the aforementioned for AIR.

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At work I am making a new Flash interface for a project, and my goal this time around was to make as many global functions out of repetitive ones as possible so we could save development time.

As I began writing and testing Prototype class extensions and global functions, I noticed something I had not run into before with flash. If Import classes on one ActionScript layer, and call it on another Actions layer, or even the next frame, it produces an ActionScript error.

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Lately I have been working on a project that has a lot of flash files that use external ActionScript files for similar functions. It helps that they have many of the functions external because you can make mass changes with one file.

For those not in the know, here is how you include an external ActionScript file:

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At work we use a lot of fake pop-ups in Flash to show information. Everything generally works very well, until we discovered that you can click buttons in flash that are underneath a movieclip or a graphic.

The first solution was to hard code disabling of MovieClips/buttons like so:

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Today, I was working on a flash website for a client when I ran into an interesting problem: My Action-Scripted sounds weren't playing from a internally loaded swf.

The setup was simple:
Using Flash 8, I made a main movie that loads the interface, and when another section is clicked it loads within the main swf. I was also using the same script that I usually do for sound, which always seems to work (and is subsequently the one Adobe/Macromedia recommends).

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At work, a colleague and I were converting a huge Director MX2004 CD lesson to a Flash 8 lesson for web delivery.

Within the Director mx 2004 lesson, there were a TON of Quicktime movies that played within the lesson. We batch changed all these into FLVs when we ran into a problem. We needed the flash time-line to advance when the video was finished.

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