I'm trying to post solutions to problems I face during my work - both for myself and for anyone who might be facing the same problem.

Today, I found the solution to a problem I've always faced - Copying and pasting items from Illustrator to Flash changes the colours of the vector objects!

The solution:

In Illustrator, go to Edit > Color Settings > Working Spaces > RGB, Select sRGB from the dropdown list provided. Remember to click OK after that or the program won't register your settings.

Next, sometimes if you notice your vector files losing quality after pasting it in Flash, try going to View > Preview Mode, make sure that Full is set. If it is set to Outline, before exporting, you'll realise that the edges of your vectors are jagged and ugly.

If this post helped you in any way, help me in return by clicking on the ad below:

I'm planning to update DesignFission more as I start to get my career back on track after the 2 years of National Service to my good old country.

Expect more Flash and web related posts coming up!

A recent flash site for a local photographer, Zhang Jingna, which was done with a designer, Yanda, won some recognition at some websites. It was a pleasant surprise to know that we won, especially since I thought we could do much better things with the site given more time.

http://www.designlicks.com/web-awards/1799-zhang-jingna-photography
http://www.designcharts.com/
http://www.webdesignfile.com/zhang-jingna-photography/
http://lancamento.jugem.cc/?eid=3013

Winning these "awards" tells me I'm doing the right thing. Undeniably, it makes me happy, but I must remind myself not to be driven by awards!

Oh, and view the site here.

Finally some tech related news!

I'm posting this using the extremely fast Google Chrome, Google's latest product - a web browser.

I'm just going to make this a short one and list down some first impressions and things I've noted while using it for the past 30mins.

Firstly, the browser is extremely fast when rendering pages! Even faster than Firefox in fact. Booting up the browser for the first time, Chrome prompts you to transfer your bookmarks/passwords/everything from Firefox. And everything they transferred alright. Even the history! Installation was fast, easy, and required little to next prompting.

Now, the first thing that prompted me to make a post is, Chrome doesn't require users to install Flash as a plugin. Flash works right out of the box. I'm not sure if it's because I already have Flash installed on Firefox or IE. But on my experience with Firefox, I still need to install the plugin even if I have installed it in IE. And vice versa of course.

This is a sweet little move that shows how much Google supports RIA in their browser.

Next, there's this sweet little option called the "Create application shortcuts...". Again, another feature to make RIA "more in sync" and working more like desktop applications. I can create a shortcut for my blog's admin page, and you can choose to make it appear in Start/Desktop or Quick Launch. Works just like a application - even though IE's shortcut URLs do the same thing. I guess Google made it sound much nicer - Application shortcuts. =P

Opening a new tab gives you 5 thumbnails of your Most Visited pages. A very handy feature that I never thought I would have need.

Lastly, I tried to access a music site which requires IE due to DRM reasons. And sadly, it still doesn't work for Chrome as well. What is interesting though, is that the javascript that website is using seem to detect Chrome as Apple's Safari on Windows.

Take a look for yourself: Nokia Music Store

Other things worth mentioning that perhaps you would have known by now is, tabs appear on the top of the address bar for Chrome, instead of under it. I don't really see the benefits of this little change in the layout of the UI yet, but after more use, maybe I will prefer/hate it compared to the usual below the address bar tabs.

Conclusion
Chrome is fast becoming a replacement of Firefox for me. What it lacks right now, is the amount of Add-Ons that Firefox has. Time will tell if Chrome will replace Firefox completely for me, but for now, Chrome has impressed me a lot. It's definitely made a good first impression.

Edit:
Chrome still doens't support Java integration. That means that iBanking doesn't work, and so does some upload managers for photo websites that uses Java.

And there is a new incognito Window thing, this is a very useful window to use if you're in an internet cafe or in office!

Since my article for calling thickbox from Flash seems to be my biggest contribution to the people out there, I decided to post a little finding I made myself.

It works on IE8!

Have you heard of this? Because this is the first time I have, and seen it in action WITH Papervision 3D.

Unbelievable shit. I can imagine just how much more creative we can get with this!

Don't know what the hell I'm saying? Check it out here.

For more information about the camera they used: http://www.panoramic-imaging.com/panoramic_video_service.asp

My previous post, Opening a Thickbox iframe in Flash, became the most commented post in my blog history thanks to Hugo and Jason . =D

I'm really excited to see that people are reading my blog as always, but unfortunately, it seems that the code that I posted wasn't working for them. I spent some time debugging the files Jason sent me, and I realised that the code I posted indeed didn't work anymore, although the same code worked for me for another file still.

I haven't found out why, but I've found a new solution to the problem, and this time, I've posted source files. The FLA is in Flash 8 format since the ExternalInterface works in Flash 8 onwards anyway. =]

The solution I found to make it work was adding the following param to the swfObject:

so.addParam("allowScriptAccess", "always");

I hope this zip helps people who're trying to do this!

Source Files: http://www.designfission.com/opening-thickbox-in-flash.zip

If you don't know what is ThickBox, check it out here: http://jquery.com/demo/thickbox/

That's some nice way to present content on your site right? Anyway, I've been playing around with ThickBox for quite some time now, and a recent project required me to call up a ThickBox iframe from within Flash itself.

As the documentation on the site only provided HTML help on how to implement ThickBox, I had to look for a way to do this myself. A search on Google yielded a few complicated ways to do this, which I did not think was effective since they involved writing of new Javascript functions. Then, I found this article which describes how to do almost exactly what I wanted - but, it requires a writing of a new function. And, it is opening an image, and not an iframe.

With what I learnt from the article, I went to take a look at ThickBox's code. Thanks to their neat comments, I understood how the functions work after a few minutes, and I implemented what I learnt from the article (which is how to use ExternalInterface) to do exactly what I wanted.

The idea is to call the Javascript function that launches a iFrame ThickBox from thickbox.js. The function name is actually tb_show, with 3 parameters that you can pass in, namely, the caption, url and imageGroup. Obviously, what I need to pass in here is the URL.

Therefore, with the ExternalInterface, this is the code I need to put into Flash:

import flash.external.ExternalInterface;
Button.onRelease = function(){
ExternalInterface.call("tb_show" , null ,"page.html?KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=150&width=150" , false);
}

If that doesn't make sense to you, you need to see how ThickBox is launched with HTML originally:

<a href="page.html?KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=150&width=150" class="thickbox"> Click Here </a>

You can see that it requires the a tag to have a "thickbox" class. Which is why you can't just use a getURL in Flash.

I hope this helps people out there. =)

- make sure frame rate is the same as swf
- set to uncompressed audio if video is in timeline.

The reason for point 2 is because flash will automatically compress audio in embedded FLVs, so if you compress audio in Sorenson, you're getting your audio compressed again in Flash. That's compression twice!