Flog: The Official Fluid Blog

As I’m sure most of you out there already know, recent changes to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer force a change in the way we embed Flash files in our HTML. At Fluid we’ve been using SWFObject , a useful bit of JavaScript that handles these changes quite nicely. The other day, after publishing several .fla files and having to update the generated HTML each time and eventually growing quite tired of the process, I decided it was time to give SWFObject a more permanent home.

The solution, modify Flash’s default publish profile to include a modified HTML template that uses SWFObject instead of the standard Object and Embed tags. Now, when I publish HTML with my .fla files Flash uses this new SWFObject enabled HTML. I was so happy with the result that I decided to package it up into an extension for others to enjoy.

You can find the extension along with release notes here.

Hey everyone - Nathan Moody here, Director of Creative Services here at Fluid, Inc. My first post on Flog brings some great news from my recent trip to South by Southwest [SXSW] .

I’m happy to announce that on Sunday, March 12, 2006, Fluid won the SXSW 2006 Web Award in the Business: For Profit category for our work on Timberland.com’s Custom Boot Configurator.

We’re obviously thrilled, and proud to have been recognized by the SXSW judges for creating a usable, fun, and innovative user experience that’s had measurable fiscal success for our client as well (how’s doubling customer conversion sound?). While I accepted the award, the true winners of this award are Fluid’s internal staff that worked on the project: Andrew Sirotnik (Account Manager, C0-Creative Director; Debbie Lefkowitz (Project Manager); Paul Spitzer, Darren David, and Ameet Mehta (Engineers); Brian Cherne (Information Architect); and Marty Kenney, Tom Hirashima and Jesse Gerstein (Interactive Media Engineers). I was the Visual Designer and Co-Creative Director.

We’d also like to thank our client, Timberland, for having the faith in us to take their product offering to the next level. Thanks especially to Troy Brown, Jill Areson-Perkins, and Joshua Deane at Timberland for their help, trust and deep collaboration on this project.

For more information, visit Timberland.com’s Custom Boot Configurator or read our case study on Fluid.com.

It’s with great pride that I announce two Fluid designed and developed projects have been nominated for Flashforward Film Festival Awards.

Both nominations were for RIAs we created. Under Best Application is the Build Your Own Boot application we created for Timberland. We were also nominated under Technical Merit for the RbkCustom RIA we created for Reebok. The Rbkcustom app has an extra cool feature. Even though the entire thing is Flash-based, we generate bit-for-bit perfect JPEG of the shoe you create that can be shared either via email or SMS.

Congrats to Ameet, Andrew x 3, Daniel, Darren, Debbie, Jules, Marty, Nathan, Paul and anyone else on the team I might have forgotten.

Finally! I just put up an updated version of the Fluid Tween Playground that plays nicely with AS 2. While we have been using the core tween code internally for several years, the playground was never upgraded. I had no idea people were still using the playground, but after upgrading our website we started getting a significant number of bounces for the tween library.

For those of you new to this library, Fluid has created a simple class ( fluid.util.Tweener.as ) that provides a straightforward method for designers and developers alike to use time-based animation in Flash. While there are a number of similar libraries out there, many of them involve more complex syntax, or add significant weight in file size. The Tweener class will add less than 2kb to your SWF size.

Example usage:

<snip>
import fluid.util.Tweener;
import com.robertpenner.easing.Quad;

// alpha down to 50% in 300 milliseconds
Tweener.timeTween( myMC, "_alpha", 50, 300, Quad.easeIn );
</snip>

Check it out here - http://www.fluid.com/experiments/tweenplayground .

Let us know what you think, and we would be happy to see what you create with it.

As anyone with any programming experience can tell you, formatting and unformatting Date objects into human readable strings can be a repetitive and tedious task, as well as a perfect target for a utility class!

These utility classes exist in the core package of most programming languages, but alas, not Actionscript. Luckily, Matt Kruse at JavaScript Toolbox created a simplified Javascript library based on Java’s elegant SimpleDateFormat class. As Javascript and Actionscript are syntactically compatible, porting this to Actionscript was very straightforward. Check out SimpleDateFormatter, hosted on the osflash website.

For the past couple of months, I have been using the FAME ( Flashout, ASDT, Mtasc, and Eclipse) architecture for Flash development. Overall, its been a great experience, but like most open-source projects, documentation is often passed on in informal settings, like this weblog !

The following are a few of the most useful keyboard shortcut tips used in ASDT (Actionscript Development Tool) culled from the highly recommended OSFlash mailing list.

• F3: Open the declaration of an Actionscript element.
• CTRL-SPACE: Opens available code completion. Hit the UP arrow to see available template functions.
• (tmpl. name) CTRL-SPACE: Inserts template with for the given name.
• CTRL-SHIFT-G: Generate getters and setters. (yes!)
• CTRL-SHIFT-D: Duplicate line
• CTRL-SHIFT-S: Open super implementation of a method

Another useful tip: To see all keyboard shortcuts available in Eclipse, goto Preferences -> General - Keys.

Hope this speeds your development along. Thanks again to the ASDT team for their hard work and great tool !