margot at work

WordPress SWF plugins have annoying limitations, as I have noted several times. If you import an SWF, and you’ve coded this SWF movie so that it is supposed to load a second, external, SWF, it just won’t work. The Loader.load “method” apparently will not function from within the SWF.  (This is why my funny-TV examples below are not true SWF players: these demos are just QuickTime exports redistilled into SWFs.)

However! I now think this is not entirely a WordPress plugin problem. It really is about limitations in the Loader class.  The Loader is the little nugget of code that you call on when you need to load a SWF or still image. It sets up an imaginary container for your picture, and then when you say “load” it loads. Pretty neat… but not perfect.

I have been experimenting with a new portfolio site (margotdarby.com).  This portfolio site is XML-driven. You click on a thumbnail image, and the Listener then triggers the Loader to load the corresponding full-scale image (usually JPG or SWF). All works well, except for our TV players–they won’t load the SWF video.

I don’t see any compile error when I generate the main SWF for the portfolio, so the code itself doesn’t seem to be buggy. I suspect the problem is simply that the Flash compiler doesn’t “see” the load command in an external SWF because the Loader code can only do its magic from the main document level, and I am expecting subsequent SWFs to call each other, like this:
………………………………………………………………………………………………………..(3)another External Movie SWF
…………………………………………..(2)External Movie SWF>which tries to load>
(1)Main Document SWF>loads>

So one answer would be to hard-code the full address into the main document, something like: swfPlayer.Loader.load(request). I know this works, because I used it in a classroom project I built. However, that project used the same loader over and over to put external SWFs in the same TV screen. In this portfolio project, I am using a mix of different players and media types.

If perfection and elegant coding were my goal, I could write a separate class for each type of SWF player, and hard-code the full address of the top-level loader that the final external SWF goes into. But that would be a maddening amount of work, would destroy the simplicity of my one-size-fits-all XML interface (which doesn’t care whether you’re loading a SWF or a PNG or a JPEG), and would essentially mean writing a sub-routine for every single SWF-player example.

I am not a programmer and the very thought of that makes my head hurt. So I’ll keep phoneying it up, and/or create a separate site for multi-level SWF players.

In our effort to develop new SWF players and to demonstrate their versatility, we present one flying through the air while a very young Frank Sinatra sips coffee.

This particular module is based on a 1956 Philco portable and looks rather like a lunchbox.

It has two parts, a “dumb” illustration of a portable TV, and the player device proper, which looks like the front of the TV, seen head-on and unskewed. This front piece is a nested mc that loads the Sinatra clip into the screen. When this is skewed a few degrees, the loaded .swf movie gets skewed too. This screen mc is then placed in a layer above the “dumb” TV illustration, and the two sections are then saved together as a new mc, which is brought somersaulting onto the stage via a few lines of ActionScript.

Because of the limitations of the WordPress plugins, we cannot embed the actual Flash output here. WordPress will show you the player, but not the external movie of young Sinatra. What you are looking at here, and in the example below, is a QuickTime version that has been reencoded into a single .swf.

Fair enough: FLV is hands-down a better video format. But SWF players have a few advantages that keep me coming back to them:

1) They let you load still images (jpegs, etc.) and swf movies into the same viewing frame.
2) They take up fewer lines of code than FLV players, and require no components.
3) SWF players have been around a long time, at least since the original ActionScript, and old players can be upgraded with minimal recoding.
4) You can build them as nested movie clips, which allows you to twist and skew the swf along with the player window. I haven’t yet found a way to do this with FLV.

I put a quickie animation of myself inside a Keith Peters bubble, with mouse interaction. Then I remembered all those old hyper-detailed 19th C buildings I did years ago for the Tinytown project. One problem: my bubbles refuse to ride in front of the buildings. This happens whether I instantiate everything the with ActionScript, or put the buildings on the stage. This is why I had to restrict the bubbles to that upper-left area of the stage. It’s less of a problem with the title (done with FIVe3D classes and typography generators), because the title isn’t irreparably opaque like a brick building.

Something in development. It is connected with “green energy” of course, but I’m trying to figure out what the animations signify. It started out as some rotating balls copied from a Keith Peters book. Then I added the glass pipe and now it’s looking very druggie. Or is that just me?

A few years ago I did a vast series of technical illustrations for investment bankers in Silicon Valley, showing the steps of making a microchip. It was fascinating and I never got it out of my system. First you make a salami-shaped silicon ingot, then you put it into a kind of delicatessen meat-slicer, giving you the wafers that subsequently get impregnated with microtransistors.

It takes your excellent (or not-so-good) images and turns them into Polaroid-style images circa 1978.

Immensely silly. Extremely useful if you need to waste a whole morning. Requires Flash Player 10. From OneByOneDesign, I think.

I’m down the street from Tiffany’s, so that’s what comes to mind every day when I see job postings for web and interactive designers specializing in “luxury goods.” Tiffany’s and Hermes and La Vielle Russie, or their media agencies, are all hiring like mad! I’ll bet their designers are classy and chic—for a change!

But then it turns out that the “luxury goods” are actually cars or other, vaguer, things that are seldom gift-wrapped—a retail establishment, a magazine insert looking for advertisers, a resort, a rehab clinic. Silly me.

I never went to the ones in Brighton but I may go to South Beach, since I have never been south of Daytona. I have over four months to save my pennies. Damn these things are expensive.

I was wondering how to use swfObject in WordPress, and it occurred to me to search for existing plugins. Surprise! Here are two. First, the wp-swfObject plugin, which I try out above. It consists of one simple line that you add to your post–just the url, width, height, between open and close SWF tags.  Like many WordPress plugins and mashups it can sometimes seem buggy. When you add it to your post you have to be in the Visual tab, not the HTML one. Below, a video swf placed with this same wp-swfObject plugin:

Below, we test out the Kimili kml_flashembed plugin. Supposedly this one has the advantage of being able to work in sidebars as well as in the main body of posts and pages, but I haven’t tested that yet.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-swfobject/

http://www.kimili.com/plugins/kml_flashembed

See also links to Aral Balkan’s explorations of the same subject: http://aralbalkan.com/606