Find Motive

I recently upgraded to flash player 9.0.115.0 and I’ve found that when “pausing” an mp3 and storing the song’s position when it was paused and then restarting the song with the position that was stored causes the song to play about 1.5 seconds ahead of where I stopped the song at? This was working fine with the previous version of flash. Anyone else experiencing this?

This bug manifests itself everywhere the new player version(9.0.115.0) is used including the Flash CS3 IDE, Internet Explorer and Firefox. I’ve done a quick search of the flash forums, but I have not seen anyone else with this issue.

I don’t think this is a browser issue since this bug is even reproduced in the actuall flash CS3 IDE. I believe this is an issue with the flash player itself.

I started using Moola almost a year ago and I just recently picked it back up out or boredom. Basically Moola allows users to play flash based games against each other to make money. Users are forced to watch an ad before the game which is how moola makes its money. Every time you win a game your money is doubled.

LINK: Moola.com

Its almost 2008 and the use of generic file controls on web forms are still in major use today. Why are we still using this old ugly technology when there are much better solutions?

Reasons not to use them
- They’re ugly
- There is no way to limit the file types displayed in the “Browse” window
- You can’t make them look good very easily as they lack alot of CSS support
- They’re ugly
- You can’t see how much of the file you have uploaded.
- No way to select multiple files to upload at one time without multiple file controls
- They’re ugly

Solution
There are multiple solutions, but the one I always use and is the most widely supported is using flash to upload files from a web browser. Using flash I can tailor the upload process to the site’s UI and design needs.

SWFUpload is a great premade script that allows you to upload files with flash.

Even though I avoid using the file control as much as I can, I still find it useful sometimes…sometimes.

You can find a flash video player on almost any website these days, the market is white hot for it. The past few months I have been porting my knowledge from Actionscript 2 to 3.

There are 2 ways to play an FLV file in flash either with a FLVPlayback component or VIA a Video object streamed and controlled with NetConnect and NetStream. I prefer the later because I like to have more "control" over things, but this is a personal preference.

CODE

Last year MySpace was attacked by a flash based worm which caused MySpace to disable links from flash including getURL by appending the following properties to your object tag:

Yeah now that sucks. You say: "What do I do now? My cool flash widget I've spent so much time working on doesn't work properly in MySpace! Ahhh!!"

Enter the Hack
Now this isn't pretty and I don't like having to do this at all, but it works. The solution is to add a relatively positioned div that hovers on top of your flash with a transparent gif thats linked to the page you originally wanted to link to from your flash.

Example Code

Just set the size of the GIF to the size of the region you want to be linkable and position the div correctly over that region and voila...you have a MySpace flash workaround hack.

I've tested this in Firefox 2 and IE 7. Anyone care to test this in Safari 2?

This is an update to: http://www.findmotive.com/2006/10/02/firefox-flash-bug-update/

So far upgrading to Flash 9 and restarting Firefox has seemed to have fixed this issue. So far so good. I'll keep ya posted.

SWFUpload is a flash/javascript solution for uploading files VIA the web. I've always thought that uploading files via a form has been clunky. I was excited when I found this script that fixes this area. Not only can you limit which file types that show in the choose file dialog, it will also report on the progress of the upload. I've been using my own Flash based file uploader for Indiefy for sometime now and its great to see it packaged in an easy-to-use way for others.

Features
* Only display chosen filetypes in dialog
* Upload multiple files at once by ctrl/shift-selecting in dialog
* Trigger javascript functions on start, cancel, progress and complete
* Get file information/size before upload starts
* Style upload buttons any way you want
* Do progress-bars/information using valid XHTML and CSS
* No page reloads, display uploaded files as they are finished
* Works on all platforms/browsers that has Flash support.
* Degrades gracefully to a normal html upload form if Flash or javascript isn't available

Example

Check it out!

I have been quiet lately on here and I apologize for that, but I have good reason (well at least I think so). Indiefy is coming along nicely and I wanted to show off one of my favorite features of the site. The screenshot below is from the Arist Manager and shows the MP3 uploader in action. The uploader is built in flash and looks quiet sexy if you ask me. For those of you who don't know, flash has the capabilities to upload files to a web server. This gives you the ability to show a progress of the upload and gives the user a much more intuitive interface. That is one thing thats always bugged me about uploading files from a form, you never knew how much was left.

Screenshot

I have a simple mp3 player that I have written in flash 8 that streams an MP3 file. The problem is this: When I view the player in IE and let the mp3 file completely download and reload the page, the sound does not auto-play like it should when using the loadSound() streaming option. This seems to be an issue with IE's cache. So far I have seen this issue in IE 6 and 7 on multiple machines when the cache is enabled. Firefox and flock work perfectly.

Follow these steps to recreate:
1. Go to http://www.findmotive.com/flashautostart/
2. Let the flash completely download the mp3 (You can tell by the green progress bar)
3. Refresh the page

When you refresh the page the green progress bar should show 100%, but it will not auto-play the MP3. To make it play you have to hit the pause/play button.

If I open the URL in a new window or tab then it will auto-play even when fetching the mp3 from the cache. Let me know if you have a solution to this. If I find the solution I will post it here.

Since Microsoft lost the patent battle between Eolas, IE has been required to display ActiveX plugins differently. This change now requires a user to click on the plugin for the user can interact with it. The plugin will still animate/play automatically, but user interaction is disabled until clicked.

A quick method of getting around this annoying problem is to write the flash to your HTML from an external Javascript file.

Example
- demo.htm

- flashfix.js

You can view a working demo Here.

Another solution is to use SWFObject formely known as flashObject. SWFObject has alot of great features for embedding flash into your HTML including the ability to detect what version of flash a user's browser is running.

Check SWFObject out here