I recently helped another developer who was trying to integrate JavaScript with Flash. I recommended using ExternalInterface and pointed him to a couple of links. He emailed me a few hours later saying he had everything linked in, but couldn’t get the example to work correctly. After troubleshooting the problem I realized [...]

After a recent Windows update you may have noticed that all Flash content (and any ActiveX control) displays a new message that says:
“Click to activate and use this control”
This only applies to Internet Explorer and is a result of a patent filed by Eolas, Inc. While I’m not interested in discussing whether or not [...]

I received an interesting comment today that I wanted to respond to.  A reader was asking if there’s support for metadata (mainly to retrieve width and height) within the flv format and if it’s generated by FFmpeg.  In a previous post I talked about using Ruby on Rails to call a FFmpeg process to encode [...]

My dear friend Auburn sent my one of the funniest links I’ve received in a long time. CareerBuilder has implemented a personalized monkey email that allows you to type a message or even use your microphone to record one. Using text-to-speech technology the monkey can then dictate what you typed. The monkey’s [...]

If you’ve done any Flash/JavaScript interaction then I’m sure you’re well aware of the different approaches you can take.  There’s getURL, fscommand, and the JavaScript Integration Kit.  While I’ve tried all three my new favorite is Flash 8’s ExternalInterface class.  This is by far the cleanest way to do Flash/JavaScript integration.
While this article goes into [...]

It’s late but I couldn’t resist blogging about ColdFusion MX 7, which was finally released two days ago. First off, ColdFusion has come a LONG way since the 4.0 days. That’s when I fell in love with the technology and never looked back. You see I work in a shop of hardcore [...]

I mentioned a while back that I was working on another article for CFDJ. The article discusses the pros and cons of Flash MX Web Services and Remoting. It should be available at your local Barnes and Noble store or any store that carries tech mags. It’s the cover article for the [...]

If you’ve done any Web Service programming in Flash MX Pro then you’ve most likely run into situations where you’re accessing Web Services that don’t reside on the same domain as your .swf file. Assuming you have administrative access to the server that hosts the Web Services, you’ll need to deploy a crossdomain.xml file [...]