Custom Component Crashes Flash CS4 (and how to fix it..)
Posted by nerdabilly in ActionScript 3.0, components, Flash on January 21, 2010
By now some of you are probably familiar with Crash Flash CS4′s bad crashing habit.
The majority of these crashes can be fixed with the 10.0.2 Hotfix, but I was consistently seeing one that the update didn’t fix.
On Mac OS 10.5.8, with Flash CS4 10.0.2, Flash would crash anytime I tried to add a custom component I had built and put in the Components library. I have been developing and using this component for almost 4 years, and had never seen this problem before.
I tried every fix that Google had to offer, including dumping fonts, resetting flash, deleting preferences, re-building the component, and nothing worked. Every time I tried to add that component to my Flash file, it would crash without fail. (Or maybe with fail, since it was, after all, crashing….)
I was going through everything, trying to figure out what the problem could possibly be, and I noticed that in the component’s FLA file, there was an entry that was nothing but a period underneath the other folder locations.
Removing that period and re-exporting the SWC solved the crash problem.
Technorati Claim
Posted by nerdabilly in Flash on December 18, 2009
New Blog URL (Again) so here’s another attempt to do a Technorati claim
GHKZ5CMBQMQW
Another new year, another new post about how I’m back
Posted by nerdabilly in Flash on October 21, 2009
I’ve actually paid money to get the blog back up and running this time. Expect more updates!
Google Reads Flash
Posted by nerdabilly in Uncategorized on January 10, 2008
Lately, this blog has been less about Flash and more about me apologizing for it not working.
So here’s an interesting article about Flash and SEO:
Google Reads Flash Text, so Optimize It
This is a huge step in the right direction for Flash. For many years, one of the biggest arguments against Flash was its unreadability to search engines. And really, that was one of the few remaining arguments with any merit.
Now, while I think this is a big win for Flash, I also believe it will be a few years before this makes any difference. Existing Flash sites with no SEO will have to be rebuilt, and sites built by less experienced developers will still probably avoid this altogether.
Also, please note the feed URL has changed.. it’s now http://nerdabilly.com/blog/feed/. I think the GoDaddy ads may be breaking it though so I am searching a more stable solution.
And, we’re back!
Posted by nerdabilly in Uncategorized on November 4, 2007
I hope.
Hosting and maintaining this blog has proven to be quite a challenge but this latest go-round should at least provide some stability.
SHOUTCast, SHOUTCast, Let It All Out
Posted by nerdabilly in Flash on October 26, 2007
These are the things I could do without.
For the past couple of months, I have been working on a SHOUTCast player app in AIR. When I signed on to do the project, I had absolutely no idea that playing SHOUTCast streams in Flash is a Herculean task. It seems there’s this nagging little memory leak related to Flash loading a never-ending audio stream. Flash doesn’t release the memory for the audio already played, and eventually that audio data just builds and builds and builds until your CPU or memory maxes out. So far, I have found little to nothing in the form of a nice quick solution to this.
That being said, perhaps the most viable current solution was posted at MadArco’s DevBlog . It basically entails streaming the audio for 20-30 minutes, then recreating the audio stream in a new variable, and crossfading the two streams, at which point the original can be released from memory and garbage-collected. It’s a nice idea, but in CS3, after the first couple of swaps, I lost sound altogether, and this problem re-occured no matter which “swapping” method I attempted. MadArco’s solution is in AS2, and perhaps I lost something along the way while attempting to convert it to AS3, or perhaps AS3 isn’t able to handle this particular method.
There’s also a nice explanation of the “swapping” concept here.
So, after even more research (by “research” I mean thinking of new ways to search for a solution in Google) I found a post on FlashBrighton about generating audio and PCM wave data. I also found this on ActionScript.org, about using PHP to create a socket connection to read ID3 tags.
See where I’m going with this?
I’m proposing an all-in-one memory-leak-and-ID3-problem fix ShoutCast solution for Flash. Here’s my thoughts on it so far:
1.) Use Socket for getting the ID3 data, and, if possible, getting the stream as well.
2.) Use the FlashBrighton wave-data solution to create the audio from the ByteArray returned by the MP3 stream. This is possible using the URLStream class.
3.) Distribute it as a component or nice reusable class in order to allow beginners to use it easily.
I made some attempts at this yesterday, but the bytecode stuff is way over my head. If anyone has any input, or would like to have a go at this, please leave a comment and let me know what you think!
now requiring user registration and login
Posted by nerdabilly in Uncategorized on May 3, 2007
I know there has been problems with this before, but the amount of spam I’m getting on a nearly hourly basis has gotten to be too much.
From now on, users must register before adding comments to a post. I’m not going to steal, sell, or otherwise misuse your information, this is strictly a spam-busting measure.
Initially, some users had problems with registering, so please contact me if you experience any problems.
thanks.
-nerdabilly
Disabling the FLVPlayback component’s controls (including seekbar!)
Posted by nerdabilly in ActionScript, components, Flash, Uncategorized, video on March 26, 2007
I’ve stumbled on another one of those “everyone wants to do it, but nobody knows how” issues in Flash: how to disable the controls on the FLVPlayback component.
After quite a bit of documentation-reading, web-searching, and forum-browsing, I’ve come up with a function for easy, on-the-fly toggling of controller-enable-ability.
with a FLVPlayback instance on the stage, add the following to your ActionScript:
mx.video.FLVPlayback.prototype.enableButtons = function(bEnabled:Boolean){
this.skin_mc.seekBar_mc.handle_mc._visible = bEnabled;
if(bEnabled){
this.stopButton =this.skin_mc.stop_mc;
this.backButton = this.skin_mc.back_mc;
this.forwardButton = this.skin_mc.forward_mc;
this.seekBar = this.skin_mc.seekBar_mc;
}else{
this.onEnterFrame = function(){
this.stopButton = this.skin_mc.stop_mc.disabled_mc
this.backButton = this.skin_mc.back_mc.disabled_mc;
this.forwardButton = this.skin_mc.forward_mc.disabled_mc;
this.seekBar = null;
updateAfterEvent();
delete this.onEnterFrame;
}
}
}
Now, for a bit of explanation:
The first step is to simply toggle the visibility of the SeekBar handle. With it invisible, there is no way the user can use it, and this seems to be the simplest solution, rather than digging through the MC structure of a component skin and figuring out how that handle is, uh, handled. So, the bEnabled value can double as the visibility value for the handled: true (visible) for enabled buttons, or false (invisible) for disabled.
For the rest of the buttons, it’s not so simple. Users have come to expect a “ghosted” or “grayed-out” appearance for a disabled button, so simply removing them as we did with the scrollbar handle would be bad form. Luckily, the pre-made skin SWFs for the FLVplayback component include disabled states for everything, and we can use these.
Because the component skins use bitmap caching and 9-slice scaling to maximize their flexibility, simply setting the button properties to the disabled MC won’t work, and it requires a bit more of a brute-force approach to get those buttons to appear. Hence, the onEnterFrame and updateAfterEvent() commands. updateAfterEvent() forces an update of the stage, so it will make those disabled-states appear, but it only works as part of a clip event, such as onEnterFrame. So we wrap the whole thing in an onEnterFrame, and then delete the onEnterFrame function to save on processing and memory.
I should note that I developed this using the SteelExternalAll.swf skin. The documentation indicates that the skins are built using a universal structure, so it should work for any of them, but I’m not making any promises.
Apologies
Posted by nerdabilly in Uncategorized on March 7, 2007
Sorry for the XML parsing errors in the feed and the general slowness of the site. After a lot of back-and-forth with my web host, we determined that the issue was temp files clogging up the cache. I deleted nearly 200,000 files and it seems to run well again!


