Comb Over Charlie

It’s so great working at Adobe! It’s very humbling to think that my team and I write code that executes on over a Billion computers world-wide.

People are tweeting about it: http://twitter.com/#!/search/flash%20update%20ma

We’re hiring by the way! http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/careeropp/

But yeah, I just wanted to point out to people out there that AMP (Adobe Media Player) can play FLVs!!!

I’ve tried it on only Windows so far, but I’d think it can play FLVs on all three major platforms (win/mac/lnx) since there is an AMP available on each.

1. Install Adobe Media Player from here: http://get.adobe.com/amp/ (click at the bottom of that flash box)

2. On Windows, right-click an FLV file, hover over “Open With..” then select Adobe Media Player.

3. And bada bing, you’ve got your FLV playing.

I can’t remember, but there was a specific reason (having to do with CS4 compatibility or something) that they didn’t register .FLV’s default player to be AMP, but I’d imagine you can do that manually if you don’t want to do the right-click->open with… thing.

Developers: If you don’t like the idea that you have to install AMP (which serves many purposes other than just playing FLVs), you can probably make your own lean FLV player using AIR. If you do, it’d be super cool if you open sourced it, and shared bins. Just a thought.

I’ve been wanting this feature in for the longest time… and now it’s in the flash player (currently in beta).

Basically now you can create Flash games that go in full screen mode and be able to use certain keys that are often used by games. We had initially prevented keyboard access altogether for security reasons… like phishing… but i guess you can’t really phish too much out of arrow keys, space bar, enter, etc…. but you can make some great games this way.

Hope you guys like this new feature

Interesting list. Ipod imitators, vista, 64-bit PCs, Netscape 6, and DRM are all on there.

I don’t agree with all of it though, for example, the concept of a paperless environment. At Adobe (and at old school macromedia for that matter), we REALLY do have a paperless environment. I mean of course we have a standard laser printer / fax machine like any other office environ, but the vast majority of our communication is paperless. We use wikis heavily and (of course) pdfs. In college i remember reading about “The Paper Paradox” which basically said that computers and networking are supposed to reduce paper, but because of the ease of printing, paper consumption has actually increased. To that I say that it takes not just the technology needed to go paperless, but also a generation that grew up paperlessly. If students were to turn in their essays via PDF and/or Word docs, they’ll grow up doing the same. And besides, look at what craigslist has done to the newspaper industry. But yeah, it’s still debatable.

Also, I use vista at work, and it works fairly well if you disable UAC. My computer is freakin’ fast though (at the time of this writing). Vista does make HW installation smoother (even though the article says the opposite), and trouble shooting works pretty well too. I used to use google desktop, now i use vista’s native searching, which i like a little better since its native. The task bar is a little less buggy. I don’t like the new start menu (even though a good friend of mine worked on the usability research for it)… too much clicking. But yeah, i could have lived with XP. I can’t wait until like Ubuntu or some other Linux becomes a lot more user friendly (and Adobe AIR could be the answer to this when we release a Linux version by the way).

Check out the video:

Ever make a really awesome Line Rider track, and wanted to share it with your friend so that they could not only view it, but can also work on it themselves?

well you can, it’s really easy, and here’s how…

Welome to the wonderful world of “Shared Objects”. Line Rider is made with Adobe Flash, and in Flash there is a way to store memory on your hard drive so that you could continue from where you left off the next time you visit that website. It’s JUST like HTML cookies, if you know what those are, except that it’s a lot more enhanced.I’m not going to go into how Shared Objects are more “enhanced” than cookies, instead i’ll cut right to the chase.If you want to take your line rider track and give it to your friend, here’s what you do.Go to C:\Documents and Settings\ and then click on the username you are logged in as. Maybe you’re logged in as moe, in that case you would go to C:\Documents and Settings\moe\Next go to these folders: Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects\ … so if you had logged in as moe, you’d be looking at: C:\Documents and Settings\moe\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects\Now in here you’ll see a folder with some really fuzzy name. This fuzzy name is different for everybody, it has to do with Flash Player security, but don’t worry about it. Just double click it. So you should be looking at something like this:C:\Documents and Settings\moe\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects\QWERTYUIOP\now you need to find the www.linerider.com folder. NOTICE that it seems like the linerider creators have more than one domain name registered, another one i’ve seen is www.official-linerider.com … either way, go to it.So if you did this correctly, you should be looking at something like this:C:\Documents and Settings\moe\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects\QWERTYUIOP\www.linerider.com\Now here’s the most important part. You will see a file in there called savedLines.sol, all you have to do is copy that and send it to your friend (you might have to zip it so the email programs don’t yell at you). And your friend just needs to take that same file and paste it in the same place (obviously if his name is joe, and not moe, he’ll change the directory, and he’ll also look for a different fuzzed out folder name). When your friend pastes it in, if he already has his own, he should probably save a copy of the old one so he doesn’t blow his own work away.it’s as simple as that, restart your web browser, and when you load the game you should see it there. Pretty simple huh?Now what about mac and linux users? it’s the same thing but instead of C:\Documents and Settings\moe\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects\QWERTYUIOP\www.linerider.com for mac you’ll go to:/users/moe/library/preferences/macromedia/flash player/#sharedobjects/QWERTYUIOP/www.linerider.com/i’ll let you figure out linux yourself, i’m too lazy to look up the documentation on it now … should be similar to mac though.happy line riding.

that’s some crazy stuff. And we hired one of the researchers, Shai Avidan, to be part of our special research group:

http://news.com.com/8301-13580_3-9768707-39.html

And I guess somebody implemented the algorithm in flash as well:
http://www.quasimondo.com/archives/000651.php

good stuff.

well i did, and it was a real pain to figure this out, but in reality is pretty easy. Here’s how (starting from the beginning):

1. you generate a private key, lets call it privkey.pem … you’ll probably do this with OpenSSL like i did

2. from that with OpenSSL you generate a request, CSR or whatever

3. submit that to “the authorities” whoever that may be in your case, if intranet, maybe your “IS” or “IT” dept… if public, then maybe somebody like godaddy.com

4. they give you “the cert”

5. now you’re like, “yipeee!!! i got a cert, but what do i do with it? how do i install it?”

6. go here: (your FMS installation directory)\conf\_defaultRoot_\Adaptor.xml

7. Scroll down or Ctrl+F “SSL” and you should see a SSLCertificateFile tag, this is where you specify the full path of the cert file like this:

C:\myCerts\theCert.cer

8. You also need to point to the .pem file, for that, specify the SSLCertificateKeyFile like this:

C:\myCerts\privkey.pem

Simple as that, now restart FMS and you should be set.

BUT WAIT!! what about the intermediate cert… all you do is open up your .cer file in a text editor, and paste the intermediate cert below the actual cert. If u dont know where to get the intermediate cert, ask the admins that issued you the cert in the first place.

hope that helps.

in the HTML ActiveContent Javascript code add the flashvars parameter:


AC_FL_RunContent(
'codebase', 'http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,0,0',
'width', '490',
'height', '490',
'src', 'ColorGen',
'quality', 'high',
'pluginspage', 'http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer',
'align', 'middle',
'play', 'true',
'loop', 'true',
'scale', 'showall',
'wmode', 'window',
'devicefont', 'false',
'id', 'ColorGen',
'bgcolor', '#ffffff',
'name', 'ColorGen',
'menu', 'true',
'allowFullScreen', 'false',
'allowScriptAccess','sameDomain',
'movie', 'ColorGen',
'salign', '',
'flashvars', 'boxColor=0x0000FF'
); //end AC code

(see the second last line)

And you should throw the same flashvars parameter in the object tag in the noscript for those who have JS disabled like this:

<param name="flashvars" value="boxColor=0x0000FF" />

… now when you want to access it, instead of doing a _level0.boxColor like in AS2, you simply do a:

loaderInfo.parameters.boxColor


and bada-bing.

And of course you could add more flashvars name-value pairs separated by &’s… kinda like URL parameters

why a whole blog post on this? cuz i didn’t see it in AS3 LR on livedocs, and i could imagine wasting a lot of time on this if i didn’t work at adobe and didn’t have access to our massive testing library.

thought i’d share.

And by the way, here’s some more information from livedocs:

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/2/docs/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=LiveDocs_Parts&file=00001005.html#166514

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/2/docs/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=LiveDocs_Parts&file=00001585.html#171273

And here’s an URL if you want to use flashvars with Flex:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/2/docs/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=LiveDocs_Parts&file=00001004.html