Category: problem solutions

Recently we’ve been looking into the great things that have been coming out of the as3nui team.

Most of the development team is running OS X, but we do have some production boxes for interactive experiences that are Win 7. We recently worked to take something with as3nui created on Lion to get it deployable on the PC side of things.

When we exported a release build as a signed native installer we were hoping to test the installer executable on the test box, we found a DMG containing an app installer for OS X, but no MSI or executable for windows.

From Adobe’s help

You must use ADT on the same operating system as that of the native installer file you want to generate. So, to create an EXE file for Windows, run ADT on Windows. To create a DMG file for Mac OS, run ADT on Mac OS. To create a DEB or RPG file for Linux, run ADT from the AIR 2.6 SDK on Linux.

This means that you’ll need both a PC and a MAC to do the exporting of the platform for each, possibly utilizing ant build scripts to help in automation of this process.

For one of our clients we recently had to test server side geolocation that we were putting in place. One option would have been to modify the backend to fake a different IP, but without actually testing the site loading from one of those geographic locations we wouldn’t be sure that it was working.

Recently we worked on creating an actionscript project that used the Molehill APIs through Stage3D. The actionscript project needed to be converted to an AIR application for various reasons. The simplest way was to create an additional project that would just load the original project, this would allow us to continue to change the initial application and drop in new files on the single machine we needed to run the application for testing.

In doing this we noticed that none of the stage3d content appeared; also there were no errors. Oddly enough, when we went fullscreen sometimes we would see a flash of the stage3d content.

We ran into an issue where in internet explorer 7 and internet explorer 8, that on pages that contained flash and had PNGs that we used as background images for divs. Instead of being a consistent repeat of the transparent color there was an odd linear gradient or radial gradient from the color in the PNG; located in the upper left corner of the element to completely transparent the further the distance from the top left corner.

On pages where flash was not initially loaded, but then is written to the page later after page load the PNGs appeared correctly at first, but as soon as a flash element is loaded the same issue presents itself.

There’s a solution on this forum.

He presents that the problem is only when the background image is over flash, but from what I’ve seen it also happens when the SWF is over the content.

The solution worked with flash player 10.0 and no special wmodes.

Recently we’ve been taking a look at the OSMF.

While looking into plugins and plugin loading, we found a “feature” of loading plugins locally. It wont work if you use relative pathing.

Recently on a project we experienced and interesting occurence. We were using a shared object to store the state of a user seeing a global introduction. After seeing it once, the shared object saves a value and the user never sees the introduction again; nothing earth shattering.

In this circumstance it seemingly unexpectedly just stops working, consistently but across different pages within the same environment.

There’s a lot of options when working on a flash project across multiple domains. Here’s an overview of the different elements to be concerned about. (continuing to be created)