Blog on Programming

This is a brief how-to add a Flash on a Google Site. Google Sites allows adding Flash embedded into a Google Gadget. I uploaded a swf file to my Google Site - FlexWebTools and found a gadget that allows displaying any SWF on a Google Site page. It is called AnyFlash. It is pretty easy to use and it worked fine in my Firefox 3.5.5 on Mac OS X 10.5.8. Then I send a link to my site to my friends and they discovered that the SWF was not displayed properly on IE6 and in Firefox on Linux. I reviewed AnyFlash source code and eventually found that there is a bug 939 in the Google Gadget API. Therefore, I created a new gadget that does not use the gadgets.flash.embedFlash() method and works well with Firefox, Safari and IE6 browsers on Mac, Windows and Linux. While working on the gadget, I found a few different ways of embedding Flash into a gadget. Some of them are pretty straightforward like simply pointing to a swf in the context tag. Some are more sophisticated. For instance, they wo...

I found a small problem with opening SWF files on Mac. I am using Mac OS X Tiger version at the moment. I installed Flex SDK 3 and created a sample project in Eclipse with an Ant build file that compiles my Flex msml code to SWF files. I've noticed that generated SWF files are associated with RealPlayer, however it does not really play them. I can select these files in Firefox just fine. But, the bigger problem is when I use a command line Flex debugging tool called fdb. It opens the RealPlayer for me, and I cannot really choose a player in the fdb tool. Adobe fdb (Flash Player Debugger) [build 814] Copyright (c) 2004-2007 Adobe, Inc. All rights reserved. (fdb) (fdb) run file:///Users/mykola/progs/workspace2/fx_practice3/build/fx_practice3.swf Attempting to launch and connect to Player using URL file:///Users/mykola/progs/workspace2/fx_practice3/build/fx_practice3.swf Here is how to fix it. Open Finder and locate the file with swf extension. Right click and select Get Info. ...