andrewlucking.com

About frikin’ time.

Christian Cantrell and Mike Chambers have put together the first Macromedia developer relations podcast. This first episode seems to be an excellent use of the technology. Let’s hope it becomes a regular thing.

Re the content – It’s very cool to hear Mark Anders talking about the way he sees MM taking more of a participant role in community development of Flash tools, (as opposed to only wanting to dictate).

(And no, I’m not really complaining with that ‘it’s about time’ dig. In my mind Macromedia have a very strong “early adopter” image).

I’ve put together a package containing the files used in the authorware to swf experiment mentioned last week:
awxml2swf.zip (79KB)
Of course, you’ll also need swfmill and MTASC.

The zip contains 3 directories:
as contains the ActionScript class files
aw_sample contains the Authorware sample.a7p, sample.xml (awxml), and media exported from sample.a7p
xslt contains the XSL Transform files
I’ve also included aw2swf.bat which combines the process of calling the compilers (swfmill and mtasc).

A note of warning – this is all quite primitive.

As mentioned previously the .a7p being “converted” in this process must be of a fairly specific structure. A single framework icon, an entry pane containing an interaction with next & previous navigate icons and individual display icons as children of the framework. Displays can contain pngs, jpegs or Authorware drawn shapes. (Curves in circles and roundrects are still pretty rudimentary so they may not be accurately reproduced in the swf). After running the “export as XML…” command from Authorware here’s the steps I’ve been following to make the “conversion”:
– to “prepare” the awxml and media for swfmill wrap any exported text objects in HTML within the CDATA[] of an xml file (see the Aperture.rtf and Aperture.xml file in the awsample directory for reference). Any HTML tags supported by a Flash dynamic textfield should work. Also edit the Authorware XML file to reference the .xml files as opposed to the .rtf.
- update the xslt/config.xml to point to the location for swfmill to locate the media files referenced by the awxml.
- using the swfmill xslt argument apply the awxml2swf.xsl to the awxml file specifying a swf for the “<out>” parameter. This will also generate a swfml xml file for each display icon in the output directory. e.g.:
swfmill xslt xslt\awxml2swf.xsl aw_sample\sample.xml aw_sample\sample.swf
- use swfmill to generate a swf for each of the xml files in the output directory (use a batch file to make this easier). e.g. :
swfmill xml2swf aw_sample\output\65545.xml aw_sample\output\65545.swf
- compile the ActionScript classes using MTASC with the -swf flag. e.g. :
mtasc -swf aw_sample\sample.swf -cp as\ -main Authorware.as

Mark Anders who is leading the Zorn project for Macromedia has started blogging.

It seems Mark was one of the creators of ASP.Net.

Lately I’ve been experimenting with generating swf files from Authorware XML in order to display Authorware content in the Flash Player. Using a couple of the recently released open source Flash tools I’ve managed to cobble together a basic implementation.

The first step in this process was to create a set of XSL files to transform the input xml to swfml, the XML dialect used by swfmill. Employing the XSL processor that Daniel Fischer has included in swfmill I’ve been able to convert display icons described in Authorware XML (awxml) to swfml which is in turn used to generate a corresponding swf. Currently all the native Authorware drawing tool shapes are being generated as well as png and jpeg images. Text requires a bit of a hack as the text objects are exported by Authorware as rtf which needs to be converted to html before the awxml to swfml transformation. That is done manually – atleast for now.

As well I’ve assembled a set of ActionScript classes to parse the awxml and simulate the logic of the Authorware icons and flowline. As it stands I have the basics of a framework icon, simple navigate icons (next & previous), interactions with hot object responses and display icons. These classes are then compiled into the swf using the Motion-Twin ActionScript 2 Compiler (MTASC).

To demonstrate I’ve assembled a page that embeds a sample Authorware piece that comforms to the icon structure this awxml2swf process currently requires (essentially display icons hanging from a framework) as well as embedding the resulting swf (you may recognize the media from the learning Authorware tutorial). You’ll need the Authorware Web Player 2004 (link) to view the Authorware content. I’ll let you use your detective skills to determine which is Authorware and which is Flash ;-) That sample is here.

When I get a bit more free time I’ll try to get the various pieces together in a package and maybe describe the steps involved in some more detail. As I mentioned, I consider all of this experimental – I was curious to investigate the possibilities.

update: the files and some notes on the steps to the use them are here.

I pointed to the beta Flash / JavaScript Integration Kit from Macromedia last week. Earlier today Mike Chambers who co-authored the kit announced that it has been released under a license based on the Apache 1.1 Software license. Its text is available here.

There is some real momentum building in the open source Flash community and it’s nice to see Macromedia encouraging (and particpating in) it.