The music is tranquil, and the setting in a calm sea, but you still get the un-ending urge to feed and dodge predators that it still makes you tense. I got bored after getting to the manta ray and owning him. Maybe you can make it deeper.
Via my man Dave.
Blogging tools are getting smarter. I upgraded to MoveableType to 3.2 over the weekend. While their internal spam controls doesn’t hold a candle to my French Canadian comments SWF + 3 lines of Perl code, the trackback auto-discovery is pretty cool. It’s not new, it just came turned on by default so I just found out about it. Basically, if my blog entry links to another blog with a trackback URL, MoveableType will automatically ping it when you post. Pimp!
However, for those who manually copy trackback URL’s, they are still unweidly. You can’t link to them because they are meant for blogging tools, not a web browser. As hyperlinks are unbroken text, they don’t always wrap correctly; I put mine in a scrolling div. You therefore have to highlight and select it. Not an overtly hard task mind you, but requires more than your average amount of hand-eye coordination merely for the sake of citing someone elses discussion.
So, I immediately thought of a Flash solution. Then, I immediately felt bad for bashing AJAX the other day (12305848’th time in 2 days), so I went looking for a JavaScript solution instead. It turns out the first 10 results for google are sites that think IE is the only browser in the world that matters, a blog that wrote 2 entries on how insecure IE’s ability is to read your clipboard is, and a security company’s report on the exploit. There are 2 ways, one for IE4 and one for IE5… never went to page 2 in search of a Moz way. While I managed to get the IE code to work for her majesty (her work is IE5, hardcore), I realized, in the time spent I could of been done with my Flash idea. Still, I owe it to myself to get out of my comfort zone.
…and of course upon returning to said comfort zone, I actually, you know, accomplished something. Imagine that.
I created a text hyperlink in Flash that uses the same CSS as my site. When you click it, it copies the trackback URL to your clipboard. Small, but helpful I think. Secure, and so far works on IE6 & Firefox 1.5 for PC, and Safari on Mac. The trackback URL is passed to the SWF via flashvars, and the SWF merely goes System.setClipboard(trackback_url) when you click it. It’s at the bottom of this entry, “Copy to Clipboard”.
…but there still is hope.
Vongo.com is a movie download service for Starz, a cable movie TV channel. I found out about it when Danny Patterson blogged about it awhile ago, and thought at the time, “Neat!”. Examination of his blog almost 2 months later, I see he’s suddenly point man for support & damage control; that’s not fair to him.
While I’m sure many hoped this would be a fantastic example of Flash’s feature set, a poster child for Flash Platform in the Rich Internet Application sphere, it instead fails on two accounts.
First the website does not work with Flash Player 8.5 because of an incorrectly written Flash Player detection script. Second, it does not work on Mac’s.
While some could argue they shouldn’t be forced to have their website work with un-released beta software as their could be a valid reason 8.5 interferes with their service, I don’t buy that. My guess is they wrote it hardcoded for 8.0.22.0. I quickly brought the detection JavaScript into Flash 8, and removed some of the browser stuff, but it appears to be working as advertised; meaning, if the version is equal to OR greater than, it’ll return true, so someone’s using it wrong.
Second, one of the strength’s of Flash Player is that it is cross platform. While I’m sure Mac users appreciate the error message that assures them you are working on it, too bad… no f’ing excuse. If the software download doesn’t work, that’s one thing, but the web player? Flash Player works on a Mac; I know, I have one and have tested Flash Player 8 and the beta 8.5 on both.
Major frustration and major disappointment. This isn’t helpful to the cause. I still feel, however, they could salvage some face and perhaps give the industry some good press if they fix these issues. I know for a fact the detection one is simple, and am at a loss to explain why it doesn’t work on Mac.
Found a better method than the PrintJob.send way thanks to Darron Schall. Going off of his suggestion to use ExternalInterface.call per this LiveDoc’s entry, I found it does the same thing as PrintJob.send. It will pause:
However, sounds (streaming or event) don’t stop, don’t resume upon unpausing, and getTimer keeps on trucking. Additionally, streamed sounds keep animation in sync with them by dropping frames if the animation cannot keep up. Thus, those animations will appear to jerk upon unpausing if the sound has already played past a certain point. This is the same behavior you get with the PrintJob.send method.
At least, in this case, you can customize the popup to be a JavaScript one with a label; that’s a lot better than a mysteriously appearing print dialogue when someone hits the pause button. You could use JavaScript’s prompt function instead.
Both methods are modal, meaning the user cannot interact with the Flash movie while the dialogues are open.
*** Warning: Loud Sound ***
Pause Example – Alert | Prompt | Source (ZIP)