FlashClass dot org

In a new assignment at work, I’ve been tasked with making a compliant flash project for a government agency. I’m finding a lack of real examples on this, and thought I should start documenting successful things here. I will have a series of post here on my findings and hopefully they can help someone else.

I\’m sitting here at the intro to adobe\’s flashcamp in adobe\’s headquarters. As things get announced I\’ll try and post it here\n

So I’m listening to the Twit podcast, and Will Haris is plugging his new venture channelflip.com, and I out of curiosity pull it up while I’m at work. In my Eclipse NTail panel I see this show up:

Hello there, Flash cowboy!
If you can read this message, you should apply for a job at blip.tv.
Send an email to careers@blip.tv with your resume and make sure to
let us know that you saw this message.

Love,
The blip.tv dev team

What a clever way to look for flash developers, if they see the message they are likely developing in flash. Clever.

So I was a little wrong before, the issue was actually the date. Now this is completely weird. Apparently one of the computers I’ve been working on does not have the right date set on it, so when flash tries to publish files from the future, it throws an error something like you have a naming conflict.

Recently I had this happen again, and apparently it was because my computer at home had its date set later, or my computer at work had its date set earlier. So when I brought the files home and worked on them / saved them, then brought them back to work I started getting these errors again. I finally found some developer in Asia working remotely with some company in on the East Coast having the same issue (because he was in the future). He said once he had the company on the East Coast change their date on their computer to the next day, all the errors went away.

So I tried the same thing, and boom my errors were gone. Just had to change the date in order to publish .as classes from the “future”. What an odd flash bug.

I’ve been a bit laxed in updating this blog. However recently I came across a funny bug in migrating a couple of my ActionScript 2 projects to use and develop in Flash CS3. Typically for most projects I love using the project window.

Recently at work I finally got the upgrade and opened one of my Flash 8 ActionScript CS2 (.flp) projects in Flash CS3. I immediately published the project, as its one of the options from the project window. It came back with 72 errors, something about a naming conflict in my classes.

Well this is a lot, and although Flash CS3 does a great job directing you to where the error is (it now opens the class file and highlights the line with the issue), I for the life of me could not figure out what was causing this. So after poking around at various files for a bit, I recompiled the project and only came up with 12 errors. The really funny thing was I really didn’t change any of the code. And of course they were all classes I wrote for this particular project. So initially I’m thinking that I’ve royally screwed something up, which is always my first instinct.

So I poked around some more and eventually my errors all disappeared. My first thought was that maybe I didn’t restart my computer after I installed Flash CS3, which is always a good idea. However this was not the case (although yes I’m working on a PC at work).

So next I opened a similar project at work that has the same kinds of errors. This time I was working on this project with another coworker that was having no issues publishing the same files (we were using the check in/out setup from a local raid server). So after a lot of going back and forth, and even successfully publishing the my files on his computer (via a shared folder over the network) I finally figured it out.

So here it is, if you don’t actually open the .fla file (from Flash 8/MX 2004) in Flash CS3 before you publish it, the compiler will throw error for naming issues in your classes (it will say something like “The name of this class, ‘com.domain.slide.MonographBack’, conflicts with the name of another class that was loaded, ‘com.domain.slide.MonographBack’.”). Opening my Flash 8 .fla files in Flash CS3, then publishing took care of all these errors. How funny.