How to bulk publish FLA’s ?

This is often a question when dealing with a large Flash project. You've changed some #include or a class and need to update a heap of FLA's which use this code. I have found 2 simple and free solutions built into Flash which allow you to do this. The options are :

Option 1 - The Flash Project File

If you don't know already about building Flash project files .flp, you probaly ought to. Built right into Flash project files is the ability to bulk publish the all the FLA's in your project. Simply right click on the project name in the 'Project' panel and there's an option called 'Publish My Project'. This is simply great but not without a few limitations. What if I only wanted to bulk publish a few of the files? Short of creating a new project just for this purpose there is not an easy way to do this. As well there is no way to change the publish options like 'omit trace actions' or the sound compression options without going into every single FLA and changing this. The destination directory for the swf is another final limitation I will mention by using this method.

Though beside mentioning these short comings this option is extremely easy to do and if controlling the publish options doesnt phase you, then go with this option. As option 2 is more hands.

Option 2 - JSFL Bulk Publish

This is the most flexible way to bulk publish FLA's. I was going to write my own JSFL code to do this but on a quick Google Grant Skinner has already done the leg work for this and it's good too. His self named 'JSFL FLA Bulk Compiler'. Follow this link to download the JSFL and example files, I will continue to describe how it basically works. Within the files is a text file called 'compile_schema.txt' within this file are the URI's to the FLA's you wish to publish. An example of the 'compile_schema.txt' is below :

The parameters are tab deliminated and each line is for the FLA you wish to publish.

• The 1st parameter - the location of the FLA the location is relative to the JSFL file 'compileProject.jsfl'
• The 2nd parameter - the location you wish to publish the swf
• The 3rd - the publish setting name you wish to use

The source of the FLA i.e. the 1st parameter is the only one that is required, if you only use this parameter then the publish swf location will be the same as the FLA.

The best thing about this option for bulk publishing FLA's is that you have full control over where the swf's publish to, which FLA's you wish to publish and the way they publish. Yes this does take a little longer to setup and can have human error, that is if you hand type it.

So I always write typo's like us all and why not write a script to build a schema file for publishing with the Grant Skinner's JSFL from an existing Flash project file. I used my XmlRemoting classes to read the XML in the Flash Project File then output in Flash the schema text, which you can copy and paste and save to a file. So this way you can easily use the 'JSFL Bulk Publish' option without the tedious process of creating that schema text file

You can download all the example files here

Semi-Permanent Sydney 2007

This Friday, Saturday I went to Sydney's Semi-Permanent 07 with the Soap crew and my girlfriend. For those who don't know it's a conference on design in any medium. I have been to the last 2 years events and often they have some inspiring speakers, I especially like it when they talk about either there business or technical process. My previous expectations of the first days speakers wasn't quite met, don't get me wrong there work was good, but a majority of them were fine artists rather than designers. I also think the order of the speakers could of been changed so that the content differed more through out the day. The second day was alot better a wider selection of speakers with mostly better work than the first, no disappointments.

The speakers for SP07 were as follows

Day 1 Friday

Sophie Howarth
She promoted her Big Day Out Photography with her recent book 'Peace Love and Brown Rice'. I hadn't heard of her before and I was hoping she would deliver more stories on her experiences and punters of the Big Day Out rather than just the photo montage we recieved. She described her self as a people photographer, most the people shots of the BDO were the rock stars. She also revealed during QA her favourite BDO was this years 2007, rationalle being since the release of her book she has since privaledged back stage passes and intends to release a new book of this years BDO.

TOKO
Eva and Michael provided us with an interesting overview mostly of a large selection of various billboard posters mostly for music events. They started there story with a humorous camparison of the differences between the Nederlands and Australia because of there recent relocatation to Australia. Then continued with Michael presenting most the content and Eva controlling the arrow key. There typographic sills were good, often building there own typefaces - which I like doing also. I was particularly interested in the annual report which they took some creative license on the graphs making them 'sexy', but I couldn't clearly see where I was sitting.

Si Scott
Si's ornate typographic skills by using a inked and penned technique was pretty impressive especially seeing he said he did it all by hand, must take forever. I really felt sorry for this guy nerves got the better of him pretty bad in the beginning but luckily found his stride later on. It was also cool Si has managed to coin and develop his graphic look and make alot of money out of it, though he did say - 'lately he's trying to develop something new'.

Tiffany Bozic
Her unique canvas of maple wood combined with a honed realistic painting style of animals in a sureal environment, best summed up her work. You can tell with Tiffany she loves what she does and has travelled to lengths to do so even cmaping in the back of machine shops. She also has a relentless pursuit for working closely with biologists to better understand her subject, the crazy geek she is even married one. She later let us know she is working on her first artistic installation at a museum in San Francisco, again getting the opportunity to work closely with biologists.

James Jean
James illustration work was awesome. He mostly presented work for the comic Fables, which he has done the cover for 50+ titles. The volume of work for these titles was nicely overviewed in a mosiac grid layout. I particularly liked seeing the drawing process that James used rather than just talking about it. He also really loves to use the invert blendmode, I think he must of said 'then i just inverted it' about 20 times. Something else that also interested me was that James said he worked as a Flash designer in NY during the .com boom and I was wondering wether he still tinkers in Flash today?

Motion Theory
This LA based VFX company gave us a process overview of a project they did for a music clip. It was good to focus on a single project like that and try and get across your process in your team, this is so often over looked at these events. The work was good but not the best VFX I have seen I was more inspired by companies like Qube Konstruct and my favourite Pysop when they presented in the last few SP's.

Day 2 Saturday

Jonathan Zawada
Jonathon's graphic design and art direction work was great. I especially appreciated the concise way he presented his work even including his reference examples. The main project presented was a series of the Preset covers he did. He also dabbles in doing online design from which he quickly showed us the Presets site.

Mike O'Meally
Mike's showed us his skate boarding photos and insights into the stories behind them for Slam magazine. He explained his story of following your dream regardless of what people or your lecturers may say.

BLK/MRKT - Dave Kinsey
Dave showed us a collection of his commercial and fine artist work. His commercial work included mostly brand ID and advertising design to target youth culture through a graphic street style look. Dave also runs a small gallery to house about a dozen artists work in San Fransisco and explained a little about the background of this and the artists work involved.

Nash Edgerton
Nash is a movies and music clips stunt man and also directs his own self funded films. Cool eh. His drive to do his own self written films while also working on stunts to pay the bills was inspiring in the strangest way. I had seen his work previously with the film 'Lucky' at Tropfest years ago and was great to meet the guy behind it all.

Marmalade
Marmalade is a magazine for smart good looking people. Marmalade's unqiue approach to design for this magazine was cool, they actually build the magazine raising titles and content with foam core then photographing it. They also don't follow some of the normal traditions of high volume magazines having set sections month on end. Marmalade has a main article with interdispersed related abstract articles which results in exploratory reading. As well alot of the direction they took in the magazine was from self motivated market research tailoring the magazine to there readers rather than double guessing.

Method Studios
Method Studios is a visual effects company with an impressive reel again not quite as good as Pysop or Qube Konstruct my SP faves but good none the less. The work presented on Seers was great as some how they managed to convince a cardigan brand to do the impossible - take a chance and do something unique. They also discussed the artistic/creative process for some of the work they had done on the movie 'the ring', some of the process resulted from a new phrase I have pocketed 'happy accidents'.

The Verdict
I really wished this years Semi-Permanent had at least 1 presenter primarily from the web, interactive or game design industry, pretty disappointing. As well next year only include commercial designers/artists - no fine artists. And a more diverse range of speakers over the first day would of been better. All this said my highlights for the show were TOKO, James Jean and Jonathon Zawanda for me.

3X / X-Series - Three’s answer for premium 3G mobile services

Just today the X-Series Australia site was launched by the place I work - Soap. The site is Three mobiles answer to premium grade 3G mobile services.

Please excuse the the cheesy 'next generation' site name - X-Series. Three did originally want '3X', the rationalle being the sites about there new 3G services and 3xX = XXX, sooo it didn't stick. I just wished with the name conclusion (X-Series) the branding steered clear of the OSX look! If only to be original. But hey, Macs are sposed to cool and like all youth targetted campaigns and there brand - Three thinks they are also, so merrily down this road they travelled.

This site was a huge effort by many of my work colleagues: Brad, Christian, Jon, Matt and I did the Flash. Most was done from scratch, while the rest was provided from the client and was localised. Though the Flash work done is nothing out of the ordinary. Though one thing I think is important pointing out is that this site is hybrid (not some full flash monster), so this site works exactly the same using alternative content ( except the product demos ) - which I think is important.

Huge credit goes to John - Mr Freaksauce for coming in mid project, managing all the content changes, CSS and adding in some thickbox loving for the contact forms, which results in a better user experience in the transaction/enquiry process.

Have a look at the site here

Flash on Flash for hybrid sites

A while ago we had to get a hybrid Flash site have Flash content on Flash content, sounds simple right ? Well not quite you could use wmode to do it but soon you will come along all the quirks that come along with changing from the default wmode - read Justin's article 'wmode woes' for more information regarding.

Any way the solution was to use an iframe as iframes will always render under the current page content, even under the Flash. With this example there are two peices of Flash one which is embeded in the page with a div and the other other in an iframe. You can also download these files here.