Author Archives: Sven

Flash and Search Engine Optimization

By Sven. May 19, 2010


HTML, video, and images are indexed by search engines and stored so you can easily find them in a web search. The question is still, does Flash content get indexed by the search engines? Already in 2008 Adobe announced that they had teamed up with the search industry leaders (Google & Yahoo!) to improve search results of dynamic web content and Internet applications. At the time Adobe said:

“Moving forward, RIA developers and rich web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable—they can now be confident that it can be found by users around the globe.”

Two years later we have experienced that some of our Flash solutions does not get many results when googling them. Now why is this? Has Adobe/Google/Yahoo! failed or is it just that we have missed out on the details on how to really make the Flash more search optimized? Adobe stated in 2008 that all existing SWF solutions, across all versions of the SWF file format should be supported. That is without taking any grips to improve existing solutions for SEO. Can this be true? There are a lot of rumors and myths about Flash and CEO around on the web. I’ll try in this article to figure out what the real facts are…

What does it really take to make your Flash site optimized for search engines?
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Posted in Flash, Flex, Front-end, HTML, RIA | Leave a comment

9
Testing the iPhone packager in Flash CS5

By Sven. March 24, 2010

Flash iPhone App
A while ago I joined the Flash CS5 pre-release program eager to test the iPhone packager that there has been so much fuzz about. After downloading the latest beta version of the Adobe Flash CS5 I started with some small and easy tests, to test the performance when running a Flash solution on an iPhone.

My first App consisted of an image of the iPhone “homepage” with some basic touch-behavior. Tapping the left side would make the image spin, rotating the Y-axis 180 degrees (.rotationY). Tapping the right side would spin the image the other way, while tapping on the top or bottom the image would rotate the X-axis (.rotationX). I used the Tweener-class to animate the rotation, using a “easeOutElastic” transition effect. The animations where of course quick and responsive on my computer, but how will the iPhone react to this? I worked very fine indeed. I tested on a iPhone 3GS and my old 3G. Both reacted as quick and responsive as it did on my computer. Nice! But hey, this was very basic…

I expanded my tests by using the new Accelerometer Class in AS3, making the image change its rotation-parameters according to how I held my iPhone. This also worked very well and my belief in the Flash iPhone packager continued to grow.

Time to build a real App!
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Posted in Flash, Front-end, Mobile | 9 Comments

The iPad experience

By Sven. January 29, 2010

iPad
When Steve Jobs presented the newest Apple gadget, the iPad, the discussions started all over the world. Some call it a ”giant iPhone”, except that you can’t use it as a phone, so maybe a giant iPod Touch is more accurate. The similarities are many. The iPad can run most of the applications on Apples App Store, and to develop iPad applications you use the iPhone SDK, although a updated version with better support for the new giant. Will the iPad be the next big thing and experience the same success as the iPhone? There are a bunch of discussions out there. The price, the size, the possibilities and of course the limitations. One of the limitations I have read most about, and as a Flash developer are very interested in, is the lack of support for the Adobe Flash Player.

Since the release of the iPhone Adobe have tried to get Apple to release a Flash player version for the iPhone, but without any luck. The situation has not changed when it comes to the iPad. The big difference here is that one of the major things to use iPad to is surfing the web. We have been used to limitations when surfing the web on mobile devices. But I must admit that I don’t expect any of these limitations when it comes to a “mini-computer” like the iPad.
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Posted in Flash, Front-end, RIA, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

1
Watch out for wmode

By Sven. November 30, 2009

wmodeThe Flash Player has supported the wmode parameter since version 3. The default value for wmode is “window”, which causes the SWF movie to run in its own invisible window above all content in the browser window.
<param value="window">

This causes problems when using DHTML menus and the like. The solution for this is to set the wmode parameter to “opague” which makes the Flash Player render its content directly onto the browser’s window.

Setting the wmode to anything other than “window” (opague or transparent) solves the DHTML menu issue and other issues, but at the same time it creates a bunch of other problems to be aware of!

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Posted in Flash, Front-end, HTML, RIA | 1 Comment

1
Some thoughts on Flash on mobile devices

By Sven. October 20, 2009
iPhone with Flash

iPhone with Flash

Good news for Flash developers around the world. Finally Adobe is pushing forward to get Flash support on all mobile devices. They have now confirmed that the Adobe Flash Player 10.1 will be available for Windows Mobile and Palm webOS by the end of the year and early 2010 betas will be available for Google Android and Symbian OS. There is also a plan to bring Flash to the Blackberry, but there is still no time frame for this beta announced just yet. So what about iPhone? Well, unfortunately there is no immediate solution to run Flash on the iPhone.

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Posted in Flash, Front-end, Mobile | 1 Comment

Fade dynamic text without embedding the font

By Sven. June 3, 2009

I recently learned a technique that I appreciate a lot. A small and very easy solution, which documentation is very well hidden. My initial problem: Fading a textfield (using its Alpha values) without needing to embed the font. Having a Flash solution that should work with many languages, and in my case with Russian characters. Until I had to take the Russian characters in mind I embedded the fonts and everything was fading nicely. But when I chose the Russian language no text appeared at all…

After googling the web for a while, looking for workarounds I finally found a great solution. Setting the BlendMode on the textfield to BlendMode.LAYER will do the magic!

myTextField.blendMode = BlendMode.LAYER;

The image slideshow displayed on http://www.visitnorway.com now uses this solution and should be working good on all languages.

Posted in Flash, Front-end, RIA | Leave a comment

2
Trafikanten real time data on desktop and mobile

By Sven. October 10, 2008

maajegloepeMaking Waves recently released two totally free services for the citizens of Oslo, Norway. Trafikanten (trafikanten.no) delivers real time data on the public transport in Oslo and through development in Flex and Flash we have created two applications that help the citizens to get quick access to this data.

The desktop version is created in Flex with an AIR application as outcome, while the mobile version was based on Flash Lite 2.0 and developed using Flash. Both applications are based on the same design and both applications use Shared Objects to save the users favorite public transport lines. Part from that there are two very different solutions. Both solutions were developed within a timeframe of 70 hours!

Read more at http://mjl.makingwaves.no/

The main challenge when developing Flash content for mobile is to develop on a version that most available phones support. We decided to develop for Flash Lite 2.0 even though we lose a lot of today’s phones. But even phones with Flash Lite support have different specifications and it’s a jungle to find out which phone that supports which commands and so forth… but it is possible J

But the biggest issue with this application was loading XML. Flash Lite 2.x solutions are not very friendly to xml loading. It fills up the phones memory in no time. So the biggest lesson learned is to find workarounds if the first thinkable solution is to load xml data into the mobile phone. Part from that, developing applications for mobile phones is no walk in the park, but it’s really cool and not to hard either ;)

Posted in AIR, Flex, Front-end, Mobile | 2 Comments