Category Archives: Tutorials

Local playback security in FlashDevelop and Flash CS3 / CS4

I’ve seen a few people get into a pickle over this one. When you’re developing and testing locally, you need to set the ‘Local Playback Security’ setting (sometimes referred to as the ‘use network services’ option) depending on whether you wish to access local external files (e.g. XML files, or images) or some other server (e.g. your dev backend server). You can’t access both from a locally running SWF anymore, since it’s a security risk. So here’s how to set that option in Flash CS3 / CS4 or from within FlashDevelop.

Making your own search engine

faviconWell, sort of. I just added an OpenSearch plugin to the site, that adds a ‘spikything’ search option to the search drop-down in FireFox 2+ and IE7+. To add the search plugin on your browser, click the drop down arrow on the search bar in your browser (top-right) and click ‘Add spikything search’.

Here’s more info on how to do this yourself.

When design goes wrong

Nothing grounds my gears like tiny Flash fonts!

You know the situation: a designer has given you an FLA file to work from and either the text is too small to be legible for us mere mortals, or is going to be too wide when translated into Russian. Since designers rarely think of these things, I find myself either overriding text size dynamically, or using these couple of handy JSFL scripts that I wrote. One of them increases the point size of all text in an FLA, the other reduces it. You’re very welcome 🙂