Software, Fitness, and Gaming – Jesse Warden

*** Update, it appears Macromedia already had a mechinism in place for you to set this… but left it out for some reason!? See the comments in this entry (exactly 1 year later… whack yo!). I guess advertisers would get pissed if you could easily turn this off.

The property to see if Flash Player has windowless mode off (meaning, you are blocking floating Flash ads) is:

System.capabilities.windowlessDisable

Naturally, it’s false by default. If you save the mms.cfg file with the steps below, it’ll trace out true… even in the IDE.

***

Via ASVGuy & Gregg Wygonik

Gregg found some documentation in the Flex LiveDocs on how to disable the Flash Player’s auto update feature. This is helpful for IT Admins.

Burak KALAYCI(ASVGuy) dug a little deeper, and explained a little bit about the mms.cfg file and how it works for those admins. He ended on the property responsible for allowing the playback of Flash movies that have their wmode (window mode) properties set to transparent or opaque. The former is what allows the Flash adds to appear over web pages.

As a Flash developer, I’d prefer you not installing Flash blocking software, so below is how you do it. This may cause other problems with existing, legitmate Flash applications, so make a shortcut to this file so you can easily turn it off again. Opaque Flash movies, as Gregg said, will appear as a black square. I do not know, currently, if this works only for the Flash 7 player in Internet Explorer, but it’s a start.

1. Find your required folder:

Windows NT, 2K C:/WINNT/System32

Windows XP C:/WINDOWS/System32

Windows 95, 98, or ME C:/Windows/System

Macintosh /Application Support/Macromedia

2. Make a text file in the folder called “mms.cfg”

3. Put this text in it, and save it

WindowlessDisable=1

Tested here, and it appears to work for both opaque and transparent Flash movies. Just to help Google out, here are some other keywords as they are also called “floating flash ads”, “flying flash ads”, and my favorite “those damn Flash ads!”.

One of my experience sharing notes, below, to my peeps on Flashn00bz. Although SWC’s have been around since November, I’ve only recently started to understand where Flash 8, or a big updated of Flash 7 needs to take us in terms of Shared Libraries and SWC’s. Shared Libraries, even if your only using 1 SWF in the end, enable unit testing of components, and prevent redundancy in assets. If I have a Button component, Shared Libraries of many tiers all reference the same asset vs. SWC’s which compile them internally, and therefore allowing multiple SWC’s to use the same button, but keep their own copy unecessarely. However, Shared Libraries are not as portable as SWC’s, more fragile, and less control on execution order in the case of mixing SWC’s with Shared Libraries as I experienced last week. Either a decoupling of assets in SWC’s needs to happen to ensure they are not being repeated, OR you’ll just have to plan really frikin’ well ahead of time. Additionally, Shared Libraries need, as I talk about below, to get the ability to dynamically change their Shared Asset URL at runtime. It’s amazing, as much as I love both of the above technologies, I can still see tons of room for improvement, in both the IDE and the Player itself.

Anyway, read on…

Spent more time than I’ve wanted to today trying to get this to work, and even managed to drag Chafic in with me part of the time. It’s a delicate process, and you can easily screw the whole thing up. Suddenly, I feel good about myself as a human being, claiming that I can create Flash components. Damn straight. EAT IT FLASH, I WIN!!!

“…so lemme get this straight. Your saying that in order for you to feel good about yourself in life, you just need to succeed in creating Flash components?”

SHUT UP, I WIN CHING WONG FONG TONG>>>.jasfjklasjdf.!!!!

:: whips out glock, aims towards celing :: *bang* *bang* *blam*

Yeah, sucka!