Here's a excellent tutorial on preloader animations. Includes human interface implications.

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If an XML file is created manually or edited manually, it is easy to misspell a closing tag, misplace a greater than sign or forget a quote mark – it's easy to create non-well-formed xml. Flash will not be able to read it and your application will fail. Furthermore, it might load some of the data and operate in a mysterious, crippled fashion, and the cause of the problem will not be obvious.

I thought I was done with the Flash-embedded-font in my previous blog entry, but there is more. I received an email requesting help with CSS and embedded fonts, and when I looked into it, found some quirks related to the CSS specified font-family and bold/italic text.

The 'why' and 'how' of embedding fonts is a Flash 101 topic. The main 'why' is that the user can't see fonts that she doesn't have. If your swf uses these fonts, you need to bundle them in the swf (or with the swf). The 'how' also seems very simple: in the properties panel for a given text field, click the 'Embed' button and select the character range you want to embed. Click OK. Done. Move on.

But it's really not that simple. Once you start using fonts in a shared library, referring to embedded fonts in a css file, etc. weird problems start popping up. I've had embedded text working in some swfs but not others, static fields displaying garbage and bloated swfs.

I was working on a website that needs to adapt to bandwidth. To really test it, I had to run it over the Internet -- the 'simulate download' feature didn't cut it in this case. And, I don't have a dial-up modem anymore. Furthermore, the adaptive features needs to work over a variety of bandwidths.

I found a cheap, very useful tool: Netlimiter 2. The pro version is only $30. There is also a lite version. With this tool, you can limit and/or monitor the bandwith and bytes downloaded for each application and each ip address.

Unlike Grant Skinner's gooify, which is a free-form distortion, the morph presented here is more constrained. It has an editable triangle mesh (which I'm not showing right now).

The 'Simulate Download' feature in the Flash IDE is very useful. It can help debug race conditions that are a cause of intermittent problems. However, it can also lead you astray.

Problem: AS2 static variables are NOT reinitialized when you hit control-Enter the 2nd time to go into simulate-download mode.

If you'd like to try it, here's a simple test class:

A while back, I wrote about rendering Wood and Marble using Perlin noise. But I've found that these code bits are a pain to use. You need to write code just to see them. You can't work with them in the Flash IDE; i.e. they are inconvenient.

Solution: package them in components with live preview. That way you can see them, adjust their color visually, mask them, drop shadow them, etc.

Unlike ActionScript, JSFL does not have an include directive. I've started writing some useful jsfl classes, but having no include means a lot of copying and pasting and duplicated code. This is a bad thing.

Paul Colton has ported my Flash 8 wood texture code to AFLAX. It's amazing that it works so well. He must have figured out some sneaky, under-the-hood code to make it work (sneaky in a good way). Still blows my mind.

In addition to creating typical Flash movies, here's another possible use for AFLAX: Flash Forms for PHP (or ASP.NET for that matter).

Until recently, I had no idea what Flash Forms were. But a couple nights ago, I attended an mmsug meeting where Derek Versteegen demonstrated some work he's done with Flash Forms and how they work.