I was adding my custom tab manager to a Flash project yesterday and found that my Tree component wasn’t being picked up in the tabbing order. After some debugging I found that the tabIndex for the List, DataGrid, and Tree components can no longer be set! This is new to Flash 8 and is horrible for accessibility.

(more…)

The launch of Macromedia Labs! Macromedia launches a new site for alpha projects and other projects that may or may not fit in the typical product run. Flash player 8.5 is there, a new wiki, and more.

Check out what it’s about, and then go download everything!

Subscribe to the RSS/Atom feed here.

Darron Schall has a nice overview of some of the new features of AS3.

I haven’t even played with any of this yet and I’m already frickin’ excited.

A colleague of mine just pointed me to an example on the FlashProjector web site. The example is on their front page, labelled “Web browser inside Flash” in the Showcase section. Immediately I gasped. Not at the functionality because SWF Studio has had that since version 2. I gasped at the sight of my own Flash component being used without my permission. I recognized it immediately because he didn’t even bother to change the look of the resize and drag handles.
(more…)

This may get classified as a security “enhancement” but it’s a bug as far as I can see. Perhaps someone can enlighten me as to how this is a good thing …
(more…)

FLAVer is a free app that opens Flash FLA files in the version of Flash that was used to create it. That means you don’t have to open the version of Flash you want to open an FLA in before you open the FLA. This is great when you have projects that were created in different versions of Flash but must remain in those FLA versions in order for others to use them.

I have been using FLAVer for more than a year internally at Northcode since all of our example FLAs are written in MX, for maximum user compatibility, but other projects were done in MX04, and more recently 8.

Since Tim created FLAVer I don’t even think about opening an FLA.

Download it here.

As an aside, this functionality has been active in SWF Studio V3 since it came out. As long as your FLA is named the same as your main SWF, and it is located in the same directory (the typical case), you can press Alt+F and the correct version of Flash will open your FLA.