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The goal of this tutorial is to create a slightly advanced version of the MP3 player application that I introduced in Quick Tutorial #1 - How to make a simple, re-useable MP3 player in Flash 8 Professional

The difference this time is that our MP3 player will have a playlist to allow playback of a range of MP3 files as required. The playlist data is created from an XML file.

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The goal of this tutorial is to create a simple MP3 player application that can be re-used easily without having to change anything in SWF file after it has been built for the first time.

I will be using Flash 8 Professional to create the player application itself and SWFObject to embed the player in a HTML page later on.

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Just recently I have come across an issue while trying to tween dynamic text fields in Flash. The problem I am about to describe is not a Fuse/Zigo Engine (FuseKit) problem, but more a general Flash problem when trying to animate movie clips containing this type of text field using ActionScript.

Demo 1 - The problem

Demo 1

As you can see, the text field labels are all showing up before the actual alpha fade has finished, which is not the effect that is desired in this case. Each item label should show up once the tween has completed to give a more smooth appearance.

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EDIT: I have updated the script again, this time adding a timestamp to the window name in the ‘window.open’ call to avoid popups overwriting each other if multiple links are followed from a page.

Today my good friend Kay asked me if I had time to look at some nifty Javascript fellow web professional Roger Johansson had come up with to make a few modifications to suit her particular needs for a project she is currently working on.

As I am usually very curious regarding any sort of modification or enhancement of any kind of code I said I’d have a look at it.

What Roger has put together is a very well done, easy to use and accessible solution to the "popup problem" - a wild mix of inline javascript code, or onClick functions - by removing all javascript from the markup and therefore separating the presentation from the behavior layer as it should be.

The original version of Roger’s script used a ‘_blank‘ to open a new window, which is obviously sufficient but didn’t do the trick for Kay.

What Kay wanted, was a way to open popups with different dimensions via a couple of pre-defined class names (i.e. popup_small, popup_medium etc.) to get a bit more control. While we were talking about it I thought it would be even more convenient to get custom width and height values from the class names in addition to the pre-defined class names to add greater flexibility.

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Took a crash course in Fusebox 4 the other day and behold it only took me a few minutes to get the hang of it and after more than a day of working with it again I must say I feel right at home. I thought the major differences in the style and function of Fusebox 4 compared to version 3 would make it more difficult to get “into it” again, but I am happy to report that is not the case.

So far everything makes sense and even though things are a lot more spread out, in terms of circuits being split up into their Model/View/Controller parts, it all seems a bit “cleaner” and more flexible. All the parts I had to create so far are nothing new, and far from rocket science ™, but it was good to see it all coming together with ease.

In other related news:

Mention of Flex 2 has been floating around the WA based ColdFusion list the last few days/weeks so tonight I had a more in depth look at what Macromedia … ehh Adobe present to the developers out there. I still remember how cool Flex seemed while in closed Beta. A lot of plain cool things could be done with so much less effort than before and it all looked spiffy too. Sadly the whole licensing issue put a massive dent in everyone’s enthusiasm. Sure, Flex was aimed at a higher level market, but somehow, secretly everyone hoped for some sort of licensing deal that would enable even the mere mortal developer to use such a nice “toy”.

I don’t want to jump the gun as to what is better/worse in Flex 2 as I have literally just been trolling around their site and skimming through the various PDFs the have to offer, but I think “it doesn’t look all bad” is a fair comment at this (at least for me) early impression.