unFocus Projects

Testing Flash apps in a browser can be cumbersome, but it needs to be done for some browser only functionality, such as deep linking and back button functionality – as well as checking other things that might change once you are out of the Flash “test movie” sandbox, and into the browser – things like file path issues. The convenient trace window is not available in the browser, but there are alternatives.

Flash Content Debugger and “Allow Debugging”

While it’s not essential for tracing, the first thing you should do, is make sure you are running a content debugger version of the Flash Player. You need both the Active X version for IE, and the Plugin version for everyone else (Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, etc.). Both plugin types have their quirks with regards to JavaScript (and other platform differences), and really require specific testing in each, so make sure you grab both versions. Once you have those, you’ll be able to see uncaught exceptions in AS3 swfs right in the browser. You can even use the Flash Content Debugger from the browser, though I haven’t found a smooth way to do that yet. For many thing, a simple trace is all you need.

A quick tip that took me a while to notice – the “Allow Debugging” checkbox in Flash’s Publishing Settings dialog, actually causes the Flash compiler to add debugging symbols to the compiled swf, symbols that give you useful information like the actual line number of an error, in addition to the stack trace. The “Allow Debugging” verbiage, is most definately not enough to communicate that difference – I thought it was more of a locking mechanism. Hopefully you haven’t stumbled around for too long with that, like I did when I first switched to AS3..

Tracing

The easiest way to trace from Flash is to use Firefox with the FlashTracer extension from sephiroth.it. With FlashTracer, you can use the regular old built in trace method without any extra work on your part. Make sure you download the one from sephiroth.it (2.3.1), since the one from addons.mozilla.org (2.2.0) doesn’t work in Firefox 3.5. For many things that’ll be all you need. But sometimes, you’ll need information in other browsers, and will want to trace to the browsers JavaScript console. In addition to simple trace messages, you can also call a number of other methods that will out put your messages in different formats and colors, making it easier to spot what you might be looking for.

Check out the Firebug Console API for more information.

Enabling the JavaScript console

If you are already familiar with the various JavaScript consoles, please feel free to skip to this part.

Each of the major browser vendors has a JavaScript console implementation, and thankfully, the API is mostly compatible with one another. The GUI is a bit different in each (except Safari and Chrome – both are based on WebKit), so here’s a quick rundown on how to access the JavaScript console for each:

Firefox

You should get to know and love Firebug. It is currently the best developer tool available on any platform – so good the others all copied it, even if they won’t admit it (*cough*Microsoft*cough*). Firefox is oddly enough, the only browser that doesn’t ship with a JavaScript console, and requires you to install an extension. While running Firefox, you can find and install that extension at www.getfirebug.com.

Once Firebug is installed, you will notice a little bug (insect) icon in the bottom right hand corner of the browser window, on the status bar. Click that to open and enable Firebug for the page you are currently viewing. Firebug will only turn itself on, on a site by site basis, and only after you click on that bug icon. Once it has popped open, you will see some tabs, with many goodies like the fabulous “Net” tab (very useful to make sure swfs are being loaded in the browser), and the “HTML” tab, which contains a live, nested version of your html code, which can be edited in real time - it’s hard to describe how much better life is in the Web Development since Firebug. Anyway, the tab we are interested in, is the “Console” tab – click that. On the actual tab, there will be a little down arrow – click that to open a menu, then click “Enabled” to turn the console on (the onscreen instructions are a little odd, their picture is of the “Script” tab – the arrow you want is on the “Console” tab, not the “Script” tab).

Internet Explorer

You’ll need to upgrade to IE8. If you are stuck on IE6, I’m sorry for you. You will not be able to easily debug Flash apps – that browser is simply difficult to work with, and you’ll probably need to output to either a text field within flash, or to a div element using JavaScript. Go and download IE8 now, if you don’t already have it. Once you have IE8 installed, you can find the “Developer Tools” under “Tools” menu. You can also press F12 to bring them up. The dev tools in IE8 are docked to the main window, along the bottom of the screen, very much like Firebug. You will notice 4 tabs in a blue bar, below a row of link buttons – click the “Script” tab to open the script tools. You will have two panes at that point – in the left is a debugger, and in the right pane, you should see a button for the Console.

Safari

You’ll need to enable the developer tool first, before you can turn on the JavaScript console. Click on the gears icon on the main toolbar, and choose “Preferences”, then click the “Advanced” tab (the one with the gear icon). On that page, there is a checkbox labeled “Show develop menu in menu bar”. Check that, and close the window. Now under the Page icon menu, you’ll see a sub menu called “Develop”. In that sub-menu, choose “Show Error Console”. This will open the “Web Inspector” window. You can dock the window along the bottom of the main window by clicking the dock button in the bottom left of the Web Inspector window. To the right of that button, there is another button with a greater than sign, and three lines. That button will toggle the JavaScript console.

Chrome

Click the page drop down icon on the right of the main toolbar to open the main menu, then go to Developer, then JavaScript console. This will open the “Developer Tools” window, which contains the many things, including the JavaScript console. You can dock window inside of the main window by pressing the dock button on the bottom left of the popup window. To the right of that button, there is another button with a greater than sign, and three lines. That button will toggle the JavaScript console for Chrome.

Opera

Under the Tools menu, choose the “Advanced” submenu, then choose “Developer Tools”. This will open a panel along the bottom of the main window (sensing a trend here?). In that panel, click on the “Error Console” tab. If you’d like to only see JavaScript errors, you can click the bottom JavaScirpt tab (under the white output area of the Error Console). Note: Their is an alternative “Error Console” under Tools -> Advanced -> Error Console. Try them both, and use the one you prefer.

Tracing to the Console

Once you have familiarized yourself with the JavaScript console, you can start to trace to it. The JavaScript command is simple enough:

From Actionscript you’ll need something like this:

Since we are using ExternalInterface, you’ll need to make sure you have the allowScriptAccess object param, or embed attribute set to an appropriate value – either “always” or “sameDomain” (sameDomain is the default, so as long as you have your html/javascript/swf all on the same domain, you should be good to go).

You should now be able to trace (or something like it) in the browser. Next time I’ll cover some more advanced uses, as well as some more specific snafus with deep linking and browser back button functionality.

A brand spanking new Beta 4 of unFocus.History Keeper is out, and ready for download! Download it from Google Code. (If you are wondering what happened to Beta 3 – I actually rolled that update about half way, and had it sitting in SVN for a while, but I never made the archive, or release notification.)

Sloppy change log:

- Fixed Flash Player 10 PlugIn detection.
- Changed license to MIT
- Quick and dirty temp IE8 support (makes IE8 use the timer method).
- removed ObjectPatentMagic
- added Packed library files for Beta 4 (says RC1 in SVN, but I changed my mind, there’s more I’d like to add).
- Added svn:keywords to most files.
- Updated tests for EventManager, FlashPlayerInfo, HistoryKeeper, SwfHTML and SwfShim.
- removed WebTV code, since the entire FlashPlayerInfo script doesn’t work in WebTV anyway.
- Fixed Issue 5. Added methods for major, minor and bugfix versions, to reflect changes to the convention in Flash Player 10 – Also cleaned up issues releated to the changes in IE.
- Added getUpdateVersion for the special case Flash Player 9 updates.
- Quick fix for shimMode on SwfShim.
- Fixes IE support.
- Adds shimMode property (it’s off by default).
- Fixed typo in call to get initial hash value (deep link), which broke it.
- Updates to the HistoryKeeper Actionscript 3.0 files. These changes are generally significant.
- Added asdocs comments (to AS3 files).
- Added support for Opera’s history.navigationMode.
- Made IE8 Hack detection more robust, and IE detectin simpler.
- Initial commit of Actionscript HistoryKeeper and AS3->JS communication framework (really just an easier replacement for fscommand). All of this is pretty rough – vomit draft material.
- Some smaller code comment and formatting cleanups.
- removed problematic _createAnchor functionality. (Issue 6)
- updated IE version detect to be compatible with multi-digit versions.
- Reworked Error messages so that they make sense in FireBug and other Javascript consoles. Fixes Issue #3
- Added direct and gpu WMode values.
- Made value checking case insensitive.
- Added SVN keywords Revision and Date, and added text/javascript mime-type.
- Fixed SwfShim.

Enjoy!

I made a promise on someone else’s blog to post the code for the Tetris clone I made a while back, probably in fatigue induced delirium, a little bit ago, so here it is in a new Google Code project called unFocus.Games. The post on bit-101 post was about game architecture. While developing the code for the clone, I did play with concepts around architecture quite a bit. I also played with learning about Flash 10 features – adding PixelBender filters, and even having an Ogg Vorbis based soundtrack for a while (tried both the HaXe decoder, and the Alchemy decoder). I took them both out for now though, as well as some of the more unorthodox uses of Actionscript 3.0 I had in there – I was experimenting, and besides, Flash CS4’s compiler is a bit more finicky than Flash CS3’s was. One of these days I’ll get around to blogging about some of that stuff.

The Tetris game has an event driven engine under the graphics. I wanted it to feel close to the old NES and GameBoy version of the game I remember as a kid, and didn’t want the animation stuff to get in the way of that. The text version of the game in the demo I posted is almost a raw dump of the engine data. The field is a 2D array of 1s and 0s (looking to learn bit shifting and similar concepts at some point, by converting that to a ByteArray of ints). I also did the pieces (tetrads) as 2D array representations of bitmaps at one point, but didn’t feel like working out the rotation math, so I ported a pre-calculated coordinate version of the tetrads from an old Actionscript 1.0 version of a basic tetris game I once wrote.

Quick note about the code – I used TweenLite to do some of the quick animations, but I did not include that in the repository. You’ll need to grab a copy of that yourself, and add it to your class path to compile the source code as it is. At some point I plan to remove that either entirely or replace it with Tweener (because of the licensing).

In regards to game architecture, I don’t know if it follows any particular pattern (MVC seems to be quite popular these days – can’t talk about software design without hearing of that). Anyway, the code is probably far from efficient, as that hasn’t necessarily been a goal as I wrote it, and it’s far from finished, but there are some fun bits in there. Feel free to take a look, and share any thoughts.

I added an initial round of AS3 files to the SVN trunk to make HistoryKeeper more accessible from Actionscript 3.0. If you are feeling adventurous, feel free to check it out of the trunk, and give it a try.

There is also a small resurrected Actionscript to Javascript communicator (eh, it’s totally new actually, but I got to use old knowledge!). The theory is that if you use fscommand to send simple strings to Javascript, you save on Flash setting up a lock to wait for a Javascript call to return a value or finish executing, which should conceivably avoid a short hiccup in the Flash Player. I’m not sure if there’s a real world benefit or not yet – one day I might get around to testing to make sure. At the very least, this framework will make it easier to setup fscommand, since it takes care of creating the javascript snippet for you. After that, it will simply eval whatever you put in the command argument (unless it’s a simple function on window, then it’ll just execute that).

Any comments are welcome. Please note, these classes may change quite a bit, they’re not to be considered stable (though the API probably is, there’s not much there really).

So for some reason MouseWheel.SCROLL events don’t work on Mac OS X. There is a fix! Gabriel over at Pixel Breaker created a script which fixes it up nicely.

The script did require some modification to get it to work with SwfHTML, since it was designed to work with SwfObject. It took very little modification to the JavaScript to make it work with any flash embedding script. The script has a register method that takes an id, and uses SwfObject’s getObjectById method to get the swf ref – I just changed the register method to take a swf reference instead of an id string, and viola! It works with anything now. While I was at it, I also took care of some errors you might get on non-mac browsers. Here’s how to use it:

You can really use any method you want to get a reference to the swf object, and pass that in.

Here is the updated swfmacmousewheel javascript file. Note, you will still need to grab the source and follow the instructions from Pixel Breaker.

I thought the site needed a new coat of paint, and so I think Tetris is in order!

Update: Moved to a separate page.

Click to give flash focus – arrows move, up arrow rotates.

There’s no start button, or end to the game – and no levels or scores either. But it’s a start.

Just a quick post.

There have been a couple of fixes and changes that have gone into HistoryKeeper, SwfHTML and SwfShim that are now in the SVN trunk, as well as a few other issues that have been nailed down, and put into the issue tracker.

Among the fixes are finally a fix for the incorrect use of Javascript Errors in SwfHTML, as well as fixing the previously unfinished SwfShim.

Despite the fact that I can’t figure out how to pass flashvars from SwfShim to loaded AS3 based swfs, I’m still going to include it anyway, with a note about that caveat. It does solve some other issues, and adds an easy way to utilize ExpressInstall even if you are using html to embed the swf (rather than javascript). More on that in a future post.

I’ll also be cleaning house around the site, here and on google code. I’ve already removed some old lingering (and useless) ad stuff.

Also, since Microsoft removed the “click to activate” silliness, I went ahead and deprecated PatentMagic. It was buggy anyway.

Check back for more updates, and hopefully, an actual release!

As you may have heard, Adobe recently released the first beta of Flash Player 10. It looks like unFocus.FlashPlayerInfo has been checking for single version digits, rather than multiple:

The fix is easy enough (I could swear I actually fixed this at one point too):

This problem doesn’t seem to be limited to just the unFocus Flash Detection script. I’ve seen other claims of failed Flash detection in other corners as well. I’d bet most of the problems are with the plugin detection scripts (Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc.) and not with the ActiveX detection scripts (Internet Explorer), since most of the plugin detection scripts out there are using string parsing techniques, and have probably not tested with multiple digit Flash versions (since there haven’t been any until now).

I’ll see about getting a release out soon. If anyone needs any help updating anything, feel free to leave a comment, or email me.

unFocus.History Keeper 2.0 Beta 2 is now available for download.

Feel free to download, test and use the new beta. Here’s what’s new and fixed:

• History.js – There was an odd error, from a mixed up function, keeping History Keeper from working at all in the last release. It was the first issue reported by someone other than myself (thanks shacky7!) and it’s been fixed.
• FlashPlayerInfo.js – was throwing an error if there was no flash player installed at all in IE. It’s fixed.
• FlashPlayerInfo.js – added more robust Flash Player 6 detection. It is impossible to check for some minor revision versions in Flash Player 6, because they crash IE if you do. It’s now possible, though, to check for 6.0r65, which is the first version to support Express Install.
• FlashPlayerInfo.js – deprecated “.getPluginType()”, and replaced it with “.getPlayerType()” and made it actually work. To practice discipline, I left “.getPluginType()” since it’s improper to change the API after a beta release (it didn’t work before, so I’m sure no one is using it).
• FlashPlayerInfo.js – Fixed beta and MinorRevision errors in ActiveX path.
• SwfHTML.js – was producing a security warning in IE if used over https. It’s fixed.
• Added a bunch of test files for each object, to help make sure stuff doesn’t break (that’s annoying), and more thoroughly test the various methods and features. It is almost, sorta like unit testing, if you kinda look at it sideways, in a mirror.
• Added Object Patent Magic to the package.
• Added SwfShim to the source (under javascript folder), but it’s not ready for prime time yet, and is not in the packed js file.
• Added some example pages – but these are really just there to test to the packed files, at the moment. HistoryKeeper.html is a good place to start if you want to learn how to use History Keeper. I’ll update soon with some Flash examples.

Check out the updated project page for more info, or just skip straight to the download.