We made the switch! It’s simply WOW!

We don’t use Flash IDE for coding, but Eclipse + FDT, so I will be referring to the IDE changes excluding the Actions Panel. I strongly recommend everybody to switch! You can save your FLA files down to CS3 if needed, so from there to Flash 8 – in case your clients need the sources saved to a previous version of Flash.

Adobe fixed a lot of bugs. There are such amazing new features now – and it’s better put together and though of. I love small changes like the library search feature, the new organization of the items in the library (for example by linkage), the new icons for the folders – we are on Leopard, and the icons for MAC weren’t pretty :-), the improved functionality of Select Unused Items and how on MAC you don’t have to expand all folders before selecting the unused items anymore, the green border when moving elements is now more suggestive, and everything else they did to the Library Panel and not only. It seems well thought of.

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Flabell website structure is created with ease of use in mind. The website has only six pages with links to the most important content on Flabell:

HOME – the page where you can see the featured product

ARCHIVE – the page that contains all the products available on Flabell
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In AS3:
Error #2044: Unhandled IOErrorEvent:. text=Error #2036: Load Never Completed.

In AS2:
Nothing shows up on the stage, and the stage becomes black.

If you did, we got a solution for you, and also the problem. The solution is to get rid of the bitmap you imported last time (try to delete them one by one until you get to the right one, if you do not remember), before Flash started act strange. The problem is that the bitmap is corrupted!

We had our good time of stress to figure out what’s the problem on the last project we’ve been working on. It’s really hard to find and we had to break the project piece by piece. We hope this will take the headache of your shoulders!

The bug also makes the movieclips dissapear from the stage, even if the layers are not hidden, and you will see an empty stage.

Sometimes, on resizing the browser window, the elements are showing up strange on the screen too, like in the images below:

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Flash Mp3 Player, update nr 3

…is ready, and we’ve updated the files. Please go to the archive page if you didn’t already download the player, and download it from there. If you download the files in the past, you can go to your Downloads tab and re-download the files. The new updated files are up. The updates are:

1. You can now put your mp3 files on any server on the web, and specify the path in XML.

2. We fixed a bug with the shared objects and the sound volume controller.

3.  You can now enable auto shuffle from settings.xml file.

4. You can set the auto-start for the songs in the XML file – which means the playlist can be displayed, but no song will start.

Let us know in the comments below, in the file comments or at [email protected] if you find any bugs, or if you need any new features.

I thought it might be interesting to post some details about how we got to build Flabell, where the name comes from and how the site was supposed to look like.

The original name was actually “Flevio” – which stands for Flex Video. The domain was purchased two or three years ago, so I’ve been playing around with the idea for a while. I did take my time, didn’t I? :)

As the concept evolved, so did the name – from flevio, to flabes, to flabell (flash bell – time expires and so does the promotional prices). At first I wanted to create a website where we would be focused only on bringing Flex Video Players to the web, as Online Video was and still is growing crazily, but later on – after a bit of research – I decided the market for Flex Video Players isn’t large enough, and when Adobe released the support for h264 format, I dropped the name, and also the platform. I decided it is best to use Flash, as it was providing the support we needed now for any formats, and with the release of AS3 we’re able to push the boundaries and get very close to what Flex has to offer (performance, speed, strict programming language).

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