Author Archives: Sam

Extensibility does not replace the need for new functionality

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S.Isaac Dealey posted an interesting blog entry about whether or not certain functionality should be added to the core CFML language. He was talking specifically about the ability to work with zip compressed archives but the argument applies to many other things.

His assertion is that since a lot of functionality can be easily added through the use of ColdFusion extensibility options–User Defined Functions, Custom Tags, and ColdFusion Components–and because of this some common functionality does not need to be added to the core CFML language or function library.

I completely agree that developers should take full advantage of extensibility and the great resources available to us such as cflib.org and Macromedia Exchange. With these options individuals can add functionality to CF and share that functionality with others.

However, I disagree that this replaces the need for new functionality to be added to the core language for several reasons.
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Accessibility software not so accessible itself

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We purchased a copy of Windows-Eyes from GW Micro to see exactly how well some of our government sites worked with a screen reader.

So we received the software in the mail with a CD and approximately 150 page manual. Turned out this nice accessibility software has a little accessibility issue of it’s own. All 150 pages of the manual were blank. No text. Just lots of little bumps on all the pages.

Anyone read braille?

Watch “Export in First Frame” when creating components

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I ran into some odd problems with our custom components today. I had a set of components and when I included one component and used it everything was fine but when I included a second related component the first stopped working. Similar things happenned if I had the SWCs marked as export in first frame, which is set to on by default when you drag in a SWC from the component panel. With everything turned on some didn’t work, but with only some turned on they did.

With a little help from ASV Chafic was able to identify the problem as being related to extra symbols in the component SWFs (the ones inside the SWCs). Some components had symbols in there that they didn’t use. It turned out this was because in the original source FLA from which I created the SWCs, some random symbols had Export in First Frame checked (which is default when you set something to Export for ActionScript).

With this checked the symbols were included in the SWF even though they weren’t used by the component. Then when another component was used that did need these symbols, they weren’t imported properly.

So, to summarize this long story in one short sentence: Make sure nothing has “Export in First Frame” checked when creating components in Flash MX 2004.

JSFL to export all components as SWCs

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I needed to export a bunch of components from a source FLA several times for testing. Doing this manually got tedious very quickly, so, I created a small JSFL script to loop through the library and export all components.

var rootDir = "file:///C|/Documents and Settings/Sam/" +
"Local Settings/Application Data/Macromedia/" +
"Flash MX 2004/en/Configuration/Components/" +
"B-Line Charting Components 3.0/";

var items = fl.getDocumentDOM().library.items;
var item;
var j=0;
for (var i=0; i

Just change the root dir and put in your command folder.