There may be times when it is essential that a Flash animation is available to users on Apple devices such as the iPhone and the iPad. Here is a technique that addresses this requirement using Google’s rather wonderful open source project Swiffy.

Firstly, your Flash movie should be no larger than 1MB and ideally exported for Flash Player 5 although Swiffy supports most of the AS2 specification. For those of you who don’t remember, you can do a great deal with Flash 5 and AS2. Probably a great deal more than Safari on the iPhone will allow us to do.

Under the hood, Swiffy processes the SWF file and generates a JSON file. A client-side JavaScript runtime loads that JSON file and renders it using HTML, SVG and CSS which is supported by Webkit-based browsers such as Safari running on Apple devices.

When you process your swf, Swiffy outputs an html page that you can place on your page using an iFrame. I know, I know an iFrame! However we’re only using our iFrame to serve alternative content to less than 5% of our visitors. There’s nothing for Google to index so it makes very little difference to the end user. I’ve added an alternative version to the header of this page, making the animation, podman cursor follower and all, viewable to iPhone users, for what it’s worth. It’s pretty clunky, probably only making 8 frames a second on my iPhone, but it’s a pretty complex multilayered animation, with lots of bitmaps and transparency. While the animation in the header of this page may not have been designed for WebKit, it could probably be optimised quite easily. A little trial and error goes a long way. Maybe I’ll follow this article up with a sequel.

This is a tip that I’m sure most people who’ve used Flash will appreciate.  Try drawing a few strokes on the stage – all a pixel thick. They may look fine and dandy in the Flash IDE but try exporting the swf and prepare to be shocked. There’s a fair chance that one, some or all of your lines look blurred and fuzzy. How annoying!

Well here’s a few things you can try to ensure that your strokes remain crisp and perfect, just the way you intended.

First, check the X and Y co-ordinates of your strokes and round them up or down to a round number.

If things don’t improve go into your stroke width setting and change the number from 1 to 0.9

If thing’s still don’t improve try reducing the width of your stroke incrementally from 0.9 to 0.8, 0.7 etc.

It worked for me:

I swear that this is a genuine screen grab of the offending lines – before and after.

Good luck!

Ever noticed that a line of text in a movie clip gets clipped by about 3 pixels at the end of the line? Rather an annoying bug, I tried everything, rounding the positioning up to exact pixels, adjusting the glow, checking tweens but nothing worked. I finally solved the problem by changing the font display quality to ‘animation’ instead of ‘readability’ worked fine!

Here’s one of those tips that you stumble upon, and feel embarrassed that you didn’t know this years ago.

Notice when scaling a bitmap or video up and down the image is subject to serious aliasing. Especially with a transparent background. Everything looks pixelated and choppy. Right?

Here’s the solution. In the properties of your image in the Flash library you will see the following setting.

Note that “Allow smoothing” is checked. This allows Flash to re-sample the image when it is scaled up or down, naturally there is some quality  loss but essentially it solves your problem. Used sparingly it may help with your bitmap manipulation.

What about video? No problem. The same principle applies, but you have to use ActionScript.

var nc:NetConnection = new NetConnection();
nc.connect(null);
var ns:NetStream = new NetStream(nc);

myVideo.attachVideo(ns);
ns.setBufferTime(0);
ns.play(“mymovie.flv”);
myVideo.smoothing=true;

The last line is the killer!

Here’s a tricky little issue that I’m sure a few of you Flashers have come across on your travels.

Problem: You have an audio loop, like a clock ticking. You produce a perfect loop in your sound editor of choice and export it out as an MP3. You then import the sound onto your timeline in Flash and no matter what you do, you can’t get it to loop properly. It’s as if Flash has somehow added a fraction of a second of silence to the start and end of the sound clip, making it impossible to loop seamlessly.

Solution: Export a wave file instead of an MP3 – Not sure why, but MP3s behave differently to wave files in Flash. Wave files loop perfectly. Don’t worry about compression because there’s an MP3 compression option inside Flash anyway, so you still get the compression benefits that the MP3 format has to offer without the loop problems. Loop perfection!

Ever tried to animate the masking of multiple areas of an image and found that everything goes wrong?

Well here’s a simple tip.

Flash hates a mask that’s in pieces. Sometimes it’s fine but sometimes it messes up, for example if you have an animation of eyes blinking, using masks to hide / show the pupils, either use one mask that is connected out of the area of interest or two separate masks for each eye.

Note: Beware of strokes or the remains of partially deleted strokes in masks. Select the entire mask frame and switch of all strokes from the selected vectors to ensure that those pesky bits of corners or minuscule remnants don’t get in the way of your masking genius!

It’s been bugging me for a while that I can export HTML with the AC_RunActiveContent.js embedding method directly from Flash CS3. I can replace the RunActiveContent HTML with a SwfObject Template but I can’t get the Flash IDE to export a copy of the swfObject.js file.

Here’s the solution.

Navigate to:

Library>Application Support>Abode>CS3>en>configuration>HTML>Active Content Files
Backup AC_RunActiveContent.js by renaming it or moving it somewhere else. Paste in a copy of the latest swfobject.js and rename it AC_RunActiveContent.js.

Annoying that it has to be called something else, so I add the following comment after the tag:

//re-named swfObject default export

I’d love to find out how I can use swfObject without having to rename it first.

Just a quick one for those of you pulling your hair out. Movie clip animations don’t work when exporting Flash to other formats or importing .swfs into external applications, like Quick Time, After Effects or image sequences.

Movie clips themselves are fine, but they only display the first frame. The secret is to convert all your movie clips to graphic symbols! They work just fine. If you scrub the play head through your timeline, whatever you see will probably render okay elsewhere.

If you are creating a Flash Banner and want to export frames to animated gifs it is a good idea to build your animation entirely on the root timeline, or use graphic symbols. It will save you a lot of hassle later.

Imagine you have a Flash website that makes use of hundreds of images that need to be regularly updated. Picture a virtual shop with a range of garments that need to updated seasonally. There are essentially three ways to help us manage these updates. That may be combined, extended and varied according to the needs of the specific project.

1. Content management system that allows administrators to select a garment from a list of thumbnails and upload another image to replace it,
2. Manually enter the Flash movie and import each new image and swap the old bitmaps for the new ones.
3. Externally loaded images that can be switched by swapping the old images with the new in a central image repository directory.

At first glance most developers would rule out option 2 but when combined with bitmap fills, a very powerful means of organising, exactly positioned, multiple bitmaps is revealed.

Take the following PNGs

So we can load one image into Flash that contains all the data of any number of separate bitmaps. Select the bitmap on the stage in Flash and Modify>Break Apart. You may now use the lasso tool to select regions of the bitmap and save them off as individual symbols. Positioning them within your “virtual shop” as required.

So what? Well the clever bit comes when you need to update the images. All you need to do is open the main bitmap .psd in photoshop and edit away, hundred of images may be swapped out and replaced etc. If you’re sensible and set up your original document with crop marks and guides, you can maintain absolute control over each symbol in Flash when you come to update the bitmap in the Library.

Once you’ve saved off your new image, select your bitmap in the Flash Library > right click >select Properties>Update. Flash with automatically replace the main image with the new one (if saved with the exact name and in the same location as the original) or allow you to navigate to another location to select the new bitmap.

Once this is done, not only will the main bitmap be updated, but so too with all the 100s of symbols you created with the lasso tool earlier. Magic!

ADDITIONAL NOTES:

There is a variation of this idea which may be a possible combination of options 2 and 3, using the beginBitmapFill function. The idea being, you import your original image lasso it into multiple symbols, position itcorrectly on your stage, then import the latest version of the bitmap via actionscript to replace the bitmapFill dymanically, meaning you don’t even need to open Flash anymore.

Note to self – when you have a moment check this out.

Ever wanted to apply animations, alpha and masks to a dynamic text field without having to embed the entire font?

Easy!

Simply add a filter like alter color to the text field and it get’s rendered as a bitmap at runtime. Wow!