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Dude, I swear, I keep hearing dynamic animation through code like DynTween, and some of Flash 7’s stuff calling my name, but always cross the line somewhere. The current interface I’m implementing at work now I could definately see parts of it greatly benefitting from such a system, but as a whole, I personally think it wouldn’t work. There are just some complexities that wouldn’t be realistic to code, even with the heartache I had yesterday.

Interface is made up of 2 parts, and for some reason, the 2nd part wasn’t moving out (think assembly interface). I traced the Output window the _currentframe, and yes it was on the right frame, but it seemed to be ignoring the timeline. I tried updateAfterEvent, and even toggling the _visible property of the movie clip, all to no avail; the freak wouldn’t move. Got <a href=”http://www.erikbianchi.com/”>Erik</a> involved, and he reminded me that setting some properties of tweened movie clip’s will stop them dead in their tracks. “Aw shhhhiiiiiii…..” I replied. Looking through my code, commenting out some of the _alpha settings I was making, and poof, it worked again. SO, I just gave the movie clip’s I was setting 2 states internally using frame 1 and frame 2, rather than affecting it’s _alpha. Granted, I could of wrapped the mc in another movie clip wrapper, but it was already deep enough, and using 2 states works great; very little code had to be added to switch it; just changed _alpha = 50 to gotoAndStop(“disabled”).

Still, it’d be nice in the Flash 8 player if we had a command similiar to the puppetSprite command in Director. You know they are gonna have to update the internals of the Flash 8 Player anyway because all these frikin’ programmers are gonna want their classes to really compile to classes and their private variables to really work… of course, what I’m asking is a screen rendering thing be modified, so that’s not really fair, but hey… yeah, that’s it, just hey.

*ahem*

Basically, puppetSprite said, “Hey Director, Lingo is controlling this now, so ignore whatever the timeline says.” You can toggle this. In Flash, many people have seen what happens when you drag a movie clip to a positive depth, only to return the keyframe, and the sprite is duplicated or other “weird” things happen. Regardless, I know a lot of developers are probably using a lot of their own animation engines for simple transitions, etc., but for the custom interfaces I work with, I honestly don’t think it’s realistic in the long run, and I KNOW I’m not the only one doing this kind of work. I’m definately not the first hybrid to blend code and complex interfaces… that’s what Flash is all about.

At any rate, <a href=”http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/”>wish-list</a> it with me!

Also, talked to <a href=”http://www.peterjoel.com/blog/”>Peter Joel</a> yesterday. He wanted to know what is there to do in Sydney and see if we could hook up during the <a href=”http://www.mxdu.com/”>MXDU 2004 conference</a>. Like <a href=”http://www.darronschall.com/”>Darron</a>, it broke my heart but I had to let him know I couldn’t go because of no vacation time left and wanting to save dough since I’m buying a new house. It’d be nice to hang with fellow Flash peeps that I’ve never met personally but known for awhile online, especially in Sydney. Anyway, he was a little disappointed because I wouldn’t be able to entertain him for a week after the conference (I was more than happy to do so, that country’s tons of fun!), so since I can’t, I recommended tons of things. Don’t know how useful they were, but mainly:
– get with the peeps at Daemon; Geof, his wife, and crew all are cool and know of fun things to do. Or, I guess you could just talk shop with Andrew for hours…
– contact a local travel agent. In my limited experience, Australia was a country that was cool with non-Bush loving tourists, and I’m sure the UK has the same slant in plenty of travel packages
– Get with Steve, Brian, (peeps that I hung with when I was there), or Scott Barnes (since he works for the government there).

Regardless, if your at the conference, show my boy around town (cept for Red Cross).

Reading Grant’s blog about the EULA stuff (<a href=”http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/000034.html”>original</a>, <a href=”http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/000036.html”>new findings</a>). Man, what a crock. Most of my clients, however, have custom written solutions. The scope of the projects are changing added with what I can now do in 7, resulting in more and more hybrid solutions because of time constraints; custom solutions take time, where as hybrid ones (using some Macromedia framework combined with my own components) are very cost efficient. I’ll admit there are some projects that where I’ve used existing components in MX, but the source code was included in those components, in the new ones, it’s against the law if I have modified them in anyway, which I do sometimes do to meet project requirements.

I’m not sure how much of this applies to the whole “dual” versions of Flash. Like, if you don’t own Flash Pro, you can still modify the base classes to get what you want to happen… I guess, not sure how it works, but sounds like sound reasoning on a way to protect the Flash Pro assets Flash normal users aren’t supposed to have.

Not having the ability to give out projects for those clients that require the “source” will be a problem for me, I’m sure in the future. Currently, most don’t know what the “source” really is anyway cause they don’t understand it, and if they ask can they modify the Accordion pane, and I say no because that’s the way Macromedia made it, but I can “suggest” how they themselves can modify it because if I do it myself and then give that modified code to them, it violates the EULA agreement.

Uh…no. Good to know, though, that Grant and Nigel are chatting about it. When the big, mature boys get together, I’m sure a comprimise will emerge.