iPhone likes CAF (Core Audio Format), but how do you create or convert to a CAF file? 1) Use the afconvert tool from Apple. This is a command line application that you need to run from the shell prompt. Example: Documentation: http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/afconvert.1.html To batch multiple files, I have found it useful to write a batch […]

LocalConnection enables two or more Flash files to communicate with each other. You can also use other methods, such as SharedObject, but the benefit of LocalConnection is the real-time nature of LocalConnection. For more information, click Adobe documentation here. For an introduction to LocalConnection, please see this article which explains how to set up a […]

LocalConnection enables two or more Flash files to communicate with each other.  You can also use other methods, such as SharedObject, but the benefit of LocalConnection is the real-time nature of LocalConnection. For more information, click Adobe documentation here.  You can also use LocalConnection if you need to communicate with an ActionScript 2 Flash files. […]

There are times when you might want to iterate through and display the capabilities of the Flash Player.  This snippet will do that: The output is something like this: hasPrinting=true hasScreenPlayback=true screenDPI=72 _internal=1 os=Windows Vista hasAccessibility=true hasMP3=true version=WIN 9,0,159,0 screenResolutionY=1050 hasEmbeddedVideo=true manufacturer=Adobe Windows hasVideoEncoder=true pixelAspectRatio=1 hasAudio=true screenResolutionX=1680 hasTLS=true isDebugger=true screenColor=color hasStreamingVideo=true serverString=A=t&SA=t&SV=t&EV=t&MP3=t&AE=t&VE=t&ACC=… language=en hasAudioEncoder=true playerType=PlugIn […]

Flash Garbage Collector executes at unpredictable times.  The engineer at Adobe have alleviated this somewhat with the introduction of System.gc(); command.  See the reference at: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/flash/system/System.html#gc() I won’t argue whether it is a good or bad idea to call the garbage collector manually.  I many cases, it is not necessary.  However, I believe that there […]

Until recently, I used to be able to right click on the Flash movie in a browser and select About Flash Player… menu, which will open the Adobe website showing what player version is installed.  Yeah, I know it says 9 already in the menu, but that’s not good enough.  Sometimes we developers need to […]

In Flex, there’s a define directive, which is useful to enable/disable certain sections of your code.  The syntax is like this: -define=namespace::identifier,value It is similar to C’s #if #endif and #ifdef #endif feature. You can, for example, designate sections of code to be only compiled on Debug build.  Or to disable sections of code for […]

Where To Get The Debug Flash Player Installers This link at Adobe has a list of archived Flash Player versions from Flash 8. http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html Debug Players supports the “trace” command (while Release version does not) by writing to a log file. To see trace outputs, you can open the log directly (using a text editor), […]