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We have this Human Factors guy working here. Name’s Shayne. He did this wireframe for some of the Pod’s I’m building. So, we get together to discuss my current work and to ensure I’m hitting his vision on how things are designed. He’s not technically doing design here, but he pretty much gave my team the Illustrator design to use, both for layout and look and feel as well as the wireframes beforehand.

We started dicussing the layout of the pods, with their use of the design elements and text. Within an hour, I had been schooled on layout, use of fonts, and textual elements. I had pretty much gotten a college layout class, in less than 30 minutes, for free.

Bad news is all of my component’s size functions are now pretty much needing to be rewritten. The good news, however, is I now know how to do them 90% right. He says I won’t get all of my margin/positioning rules right the first time, nor have I got all of this figured out yet. I have 2 pages of his notes with which to use as reference; some on the back of wireframes, the other on a graph paper I ganked from my manager. Good stuff. Makes layout using coding harder, but in the long run, a lot better…looking.

Werkin’ on a project this weekend where separating the audio to a level wasn’t an option because I needed the code to be simple. It was a simple slideshow with synced (streamed) audio, and the deadline was tight. The problem, though, was each test movie took a long time. Eventually, I’d change the audio compression to RAW just so the compile times were better, but a 4 meg mp3 even at RAW compression still took about 10-20 seconds on my 800 p2.

I managed to get the main interface and all it’s parts to be consolidated into one SWC. This was really nice as I could reuse it in other movies simply for it’s interface, since unless you setup event listeners, it didn’t do anything.

Frustrated post project on how to make things more efficient, I tried to do some SWC tests this morning with audio. First thing I forgot was that SWC’s, are in essence, SWF’s. Flash will merge them with the SWF your compiling too. Since an MP3/Audio file that is merged with the timeline, and only the timeline won’t export into your final movie. Thus, it gets compressed twice. So, I set its linkageID, and tried that. Even though the same 1 meg SWF went from 3 minutes (mp3 64 bit Best) to 3 seconds, the audio kept getting recompressed. Not really sure why, since I set the audio via the mp3 itself in the source FLA, and didn’t have override audio compression settings checked in the Publish settings.

At any rate, what I did conclude is that for anything I can consolidate into an SWC greatly expedites my development time, whether for programming projects or others. Besides, most non-programming projects have a plethora of library media of graphics, bitmaps, text, ect, and it’s nice to have just one symbol to deal with. The time savings in compiling from using SWC’s for non-programmatic content is definitely worth investing time in to learn and test them out. Multiply 3 minutes by how many times I typically do a test movie in a typical development session, and then change that number to 3 seconds… you can see how much more efficient you can get if you implement this solution across the board.

Finishing up a project which consists of a series of Flash presentation SWF’s. The controller that plays them uses an XML file to determine what SWF’s to play as well as what their frame labels are. Since I have to document this manually, and some of the SWF’s have timelines between 7 to 10 thousand frames long, scrolling to find them is tough. Thus, I made this script to list them for me. Assumes you have a layer named “labels”.

show frame labels – JSFL

function init()
{
        var doc = fl.getDocumentDOM();
        var tim = doc.getTimeline();
        var l_array = tim.layers;
        var i = l_array.length;
        while(i--){
                var lay = l_array[i];
                if(lay.name.toLowerCase() == "labels"){
                        var f_array = lay.frames;
                        var s = "";
                        var last = "";
                        for(var f=0; fif(f_array[f].labelType == "name"){
                                        if(f_array[f].name != last){
                                                s += "frame: " + f_array[f].name + ", number: " + (f + 1) + "\n";
                                                last = f_array[f].name;
                                        }
                                }
                        }
                        fl.trace("*** Frame Labels ***");
                        fl.trace(s);
                        return;
                }
        }
}

init();