Adobe Flash CS3 - 3 minute load!?

I've just downloaded Flash CS3. It promises much, but at 1.2GB, the install seems a little on the large side. Along with Flash comes Adobe Bridge, Device Central (whatever that is), ExtendScript Toolkit (eh?), and the video encoder. I'm sure all of these apps will be quite useful, once I've got to know what they do.

To my annoyance, Flash CS3 seems to have been Adobefied in the same way as Acrobat Reader 8. Every time I try and open a pdf, no matter how big or small, Acrobat Reader grinds to a halt for about 5 minutes or crashes completely.

I have a 3GHz dual core machine with 2GB of RAM and it takes 3 minutes for Flash CS3 to start!

I'll put this down as a trial version quirk and hope the final version isn't as slow. But I'm not holding my breath, after 3 minutes I'd be clinically brain dead!

Flex Coldfusion Integration - don't follow Adobe!

So... I've had a bit of free time at work to brush up on Flex, specifically Flex and Coldfusion integration.

I've been doing Flash remoting with Coldfusion Flash forms, which were really Flex 1.5. for the last 18 months. I followed the CFC structures as described on www.asfusion.com and ray.camdenfamily.com: store your CFC's in the Application scope and access them with a lightweight proxy CFC that handles the remoting. This structure improves performance, as the proxy CFC is instantiated on each request and it acts as an interface to the bulky CFC's that do all the complicated stuff. From Flex's point of view, this proxy CFC acts just like any other web service on any platform.

So I've been confused by Adobe's instructions for Flex / Coldfusion integration. They suggest you create Actionscript equivalents of your CFC's and essentially map the properties and methods of the CFC into Actionscript. This has the benefit of accessing CFC's as if they were native classes and there'd be no problem with handling data types - essentially extending Flex with Coldfusion.

However, my new job is in Calgary, Canada, where PHP reigns and Coldfusion is a rarity, hardly anyone uses it. So why would I create a Flex app which is so intertwined with Coldfusion? Even if I was in a Coldfusion centric environment, I still wouldn't build this way as I may need to port the Flex application to another Platform. I could quickly convert the CFC's to PHP classes and have no need to change the Flex application at all.

The reason I rant, is that I've been following Flex tutorials which have been confusing and going against what I thought was "right". I think I'll just stick with tips from AS Fusion and Ray Camden from now on!

Declaring global array variables in classes

When declaring a global array public/private variable in a class, make sure you only call new Array() in the constructor like so:

class myClass{

private var __myArray:Array;

function myClass(){
__myArray = new Array();
}

}

NOT like this:

class myClass{

private var __myArray:Array = new Array();

function myClass(){}

}

If you declare array vars as above,__myArray in subsequent instantiations of myClass will contain the data from the first instantiation of myClass. Seem like a bug to me, but at least I now know not to declare variables like this again!

Flash wmode / Firefox: key.isDown() always returns false

If you set wmode when you embed your Flash movie, key presses will not work in Firefox. This is because, in Firefox, Key.isDown() always returns false.

If using wmode, use Key.getCode() instead of Key.isDown()

This post helped me solve the problem:
http://www.johanvanmol.org/content/view/47/41/

Dreamweaver 8 / IE 7 FTP bug

My computer at work melted recently (literally) and after IT rebuilt it I found all my FTP details for sites in Dreamweaver 8 would go missing every time I reopened it.

This is a bug with the IE 7 "release candidate", which does weird things to registry entries. Here's the Adobe technote:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=3491671c