Flash CS3 with MacbookPro = Very Slow

A few weeks ago my old Windows laptop suddenly went into a blue screen nose dive from which it never recovered.  Given the choice between a Vista based laptop and a Macbook Pro the choice seemed obvious.  But during the week I finally had a chance to return to a Flash  game I'm developing.  There were a few missing font issues due to differences between Mac and PC standard fonts but that didn't take long to sort out.  So finally I'm testing my physcis based game for the first time on my Mac and it runs like a dog.  It ran real smooth on my crappy old PC and it runs real smooth when I run it in the browser.  So why does it look like a slow motion replay when run from Flash CS3 on the Macbook Pro.  I had installed all available CS3 updates the day before this.  So I felt confident I had the latest version and any bug fixes would be applied.  Naturally I started searching the forums and yes there were many posts on performance issues for Flash CS3 on the Macbook Pro.  Mostly I found complaints but I did come across one totally insane idea that the crazed writer claimed worked.  To remove all performamce issues they open and close the Flash help panel and problem solved.  I was desperate and so I took the road less travelled and ,yes, my problem was solved.  Opening and closing the help panel in Flash CS3 removes all performance issues on the Macbook Pro.  Why and how the hell they came across this solution I have no idea.  It's like blue vein cheese.  How did anyone ever realise blue vein cheese should be eaten and not thrown away.  Oh, look the cheese is off!  No, no, no it's fine here try a piece.  My Flash app runs like a dog here let me just try opening the help panel.  How ever they did it I thank them.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Bridge : Managing Favorites

If you are like me then you like to get rid of extraneous clutter in the applications you use. Therefore one of the first things I did after installing CS3 was to have a close look at what was available within each application and decide what wasn't needed and if it was possible to get rid of the things I wouldn't need.

Bridge opens with a long list of Favourites. Some of these feel more like marketing (i.e Start Meeting) than an actual feature. They are easy to get rid of you just right click and select "Remove From Favorites". One of the first things to go was Bridge Home. But today Alan Mussellman has a post "Bridge Home and Fireworks CS3" that got me to thinking I may have been a bit hasty in my decision to remove Bridge Home. But how do you get a banished favorite back. In the end it took me a while to work this out. I looked in all the menus and sub-menus, searched the help all with no luck. Finally I decided to look in preferences (win :Edit > Preferences; Mac : Bridge > Preferences). Under General preferences at the bottom of the page you'll find a list of the available top level favorites. Just tick the checkbox for the items you want to see.

If you want to add a folder to your favorites you can drag and drop it from the content pane to the favorites panel. This is useful for quickly accessing current project files.

Some of the default favorites are Flash pages (i.e. Bridge Home). So I guess there must be some way to add our own favorites pages using Flash/Flex. Now that could be really useful. I can think of a lot of conent I wouldn't mind accessing in Bridge. But a few quick tests show web pages being opened by the default browser and swf files getting opened by Flash (even after adding them to Favorites). Think I'll need to add this to my Research list.

Additional (19th August, 2007):

It seems there is some information around relating to extending Bridge CS3. You can find a few examples at the Adobe - Bridge Exchange.

Adobe CS3 : Install Headache

I've just spent a good part of the last 24 hours installing Adobe CS3 Web Premium.  Sure I didn't spend the whole time on the install.  But I was doing something towards it for most of my waking hours.  I have never had so much trouble installing the web studio before.  Perhaps the most disappointing part was that I couldn't use my serial number with the trial software I installed last month.  Consequently I had to uninstall every application before trying to install the suite (each application took 20 minutes to uninstall).  This was a real headache as I don't have a DVD drive and the suite only comes on DVD.  This is clearly mentioned in the system requirements so I can't grumble here.  But it wasn't an unreasonable assumption that I could use my serial number to activate the trial software.  In the end I had to transfer the 2GB of install onto a Flash drive and install from there (I wasted quite a bit of time exploring other options before I found this solution; which required the purchase of a 2GB+ Flash drive).

I made one big mistake while uninstalling the Flash trial; I didn't uninstall the Flash player and plugin because I needed them for Flex. When I ran the installer I couldn't install Flash because it said I already had Flash (because I hadn't uninstalled the player and plugin).  In the end it took another 20 minutes to uninstall the two remaining Flash components before I could re-run the installer.

The final small obstacle was that I couldn't activate the software without disabling my firewall.  This wasn't a big thing (though I didn't feel comfortable about needing to disable my firewall). 

My question at the end of all this is why does it need to be so difficult (and I know from searching that my experience is mild compared to some).  Most of the issues seem to come from an attempt to make the different applications interact more seamlessly.  Most of the install (and uninstall) time is spent dealing with "shared components".   But I'd give that up in a second if I was given some options about how I want to install and use the software.  I rarely need my applications to work hand in hand.  What I want is for them to start quickly, run efficiently and take care of the job at hand with as little fuss as possible so I can move onto to the next part of the workflow.  I'm sure I'm not speaking for everyone.  But at the same time I'm sure I'm not the only user who feels this way.

Adobe CS3 : Suite Inconsistencies

One the new features that I'm loving in Photoshop is the new compact panel system. When not in use panels appear as a cluster of grouped buttons on the right hand edge of the interface. Selecting a panels button (i.e Layers) opens that panel for use. Selecting a different panel will close the current one. It also seems to have enough intelligence to know when you're likely to want to keep it open. So far I haven't found any annoyances using this system in Photoshop. In fact more than once I've been heard to exclaim loudly how much I love it.

The same system is used in Flash and Illustrator. But hasn't been added to Fireworks and Dreamweaver. This adds a significant inconsistency between applications within the suite. Sure this is a minor gripe. Theses applications were originally released by two companies in two completely unrelated suites. So it's not a surprise that both suites of software aren't fully integrated in this first post merger release. But that doesn't mean I can't be working in Fireworks wishing I had that great compact panel system that they have in Photoshop.

The one post-Macromedia product that does have the compact menu is Flash. But the system is no where near as stable and intelligent as the Photoshop implementation. The problem seems to mostly effect the larger panels like Help and Actions. The Help panel in particular seems to be very flakey in it's behaviour. I guess we'll need to wait for CS4 to see these things sorted out.

Fireworks CS3 : Creating Flex Symbols

Fireworks CS3 added the ability to export an MXML layout from your design for use with Flex. To assist this it includes a selection of common Flex components. These components are stored in Windows > Common Libraries > Flex Components. By adding the Button to your design and exporting to MXML you will find yourself with the appropriate MXML for a basic application with a Button. This is great as far asit goes. The Flex Components within Fireworks represent a small subset of the available Flex components. You have very limited options for styling these components and everything will be positioned absolutely. The good news is that it's not too hard to create your own Fireworks Flex Components (FFC's)and that you can add more styling options quite simply. That's what I will talk about in this post. We will go through the process of creating a simple FFC : a HRule.

There are two files required to make an FFC ; a Firework's png containing a symbol and a jsf file. So to get started create a new file in Fireworks CS3 (I made mine 50 x 5px). Next use the Line tool to create a horizontal line that stretches from the left to the right edge. Select your new line and give it an instance name (top left of the property inspector ; I called mine "line"). Copy and paste the first line, move it down one pixel and change it's opacity to 30 and call it shadow (for reasons I hope are obvious or will be soon). Finally select both lines and select F8 (or Modify > Symbol > Convert To Symbol) to convert your line to a symbol. Name your symbol HRule and select "Save to Common Library" and select "OK". A "Save" dialog appears open to <user settings>\Application Data\Adobe\Fireworks 9\Common Library\Custom Symbols (Windows), or <user name>/Application Support/Adobe/Fireworks9/Common Library/Custom Symbols (Macintosh) directory. If you save your symbol there it will appear in the Common Library panel under Custom Symbols. It must be saved within Common Library to appear within the Common Library. But you can create your own folder within Common Library with a more useful name. The symbol will be saved as ComponentName.graphic.png (in this case HRule.graphic.png). The distrubing thing is that your symbol will disappear from the stage and you'll need to find it within the Common Library and drag it onto the stage to continue.

So far so good! Now we want to create the javascript file that will power the symbol properties and control what MXML is created. To simplify this a kind someone has created a command panel to help with this process. So select the newly created HRule instance and then select Commands > Create Symbol Script. This will open an editor dialog. Select the symbol you want to edit using the button provided. If a symbol script exists for this symbol you will be prompted to import and continue editing that file. Otherwise you can start adding attributes.

The HRule has three style attributes that we'll want to change ; shadowColor, strokeColor, strokeWidth. Select the "+" at the top of the properties area. You'll notice under element name that our two lines are listed. Let's start by selecting "line". Now under attribute select fillColor; this is the Fireworks property that will be changed. Set property name to strokeColor this is what will be displayed in the Symbol Properties panel and written into the MXML. Finally you can select a default color if you wish. Repeat this for shadowColor (the strokeWidth takes a bit more work to get Fireworks to reflect the changes so I'm leaving this out to keep the example clear and simple). You can adjust the order using the arrow buttons at the top right. When you are happy select "Save".

We're nearly there. Just one more step. The script creator does most of the work for us. But I found there was one change needed so locate the jsf file (in the same folder as you saved the symbol) and open it in your preferred editor (Dreamweaver will do fine). Locate a function called "setDefaultValues" near the top of the file and add the following line after the opening curly brace:

Widget.elem.customData["flexClassName"] = "HRule";

In any new FFC's you create exchange HRule for the Flex components name. That should be all we need to do. Now to test it create a new file in Fireworks (say 60x10 px if you used my suggested dimensions). Open the "Common Library" panel if it's closed and select reload from the panel menu. Look for a folder with the same name you saved your HRule into. Open the folder and you will hopefully see your HRule component; drag it onto the stage. You should be able to change the colour of the stroke and it's shadow using the "Symbol Properties" panel.

Finally, go to File > Export and under the export options select "MXML and images" and then "Save". If you open that MXML file you should see an HRule element with the colors you selected. That's it.

HRule is a simple example and we haven't implemented all the available styles. We could easily add the strokeWidth directly to the jsf file (it is defined in the source files). It won't display the changes within Fireworks which limits the usefulness from a design perspective. But it will be included in the MXML file which helps in Flex. A good place to learn more about the possibilities is to take a look at the png and jsf files for the actual Flex Components. To find these look in application_folder/Adobe Fireworks CS3\Configuration\Common Library\Flex Components\. You can get a copy of my source files to help if you get stuck.

Contribute CS3 - Blogging Problems

I'm particularly interested in the blogging features of Contribute CS3 and as mentioned in an earlier post I've been focussing my tests on these features. I had no trouble creating a connection to my Blogger account or making a new post. But it has proved to be impossible to actually edit an existing post. I can easily find and select the post. But actually trying to open it for editing gives me a wild sequence of alert dialogs. I firstly get a "failed to open document" alert followed by a "Save changes to untitled-1?". This cycle repeats and often leads to Contribute crashing.

Naturally I went searching for some documentation or work around for this problem on the product support site; with no luck. So I tried the Adobe Support Forums searching first and then when that failed posting. The post has been there for the last three days with no response. Which lead me to start looking around the forums. What I found were a group of lost souls unable to find some desperately needed help. I eventually did find a thread where an Adobe person offered some support after three weeks of frustrated posting (mostly about their frustration).

So what we find is a great feature that seems to have quite a few bugs that Adobe seems keen to ignore. I'd love to get this feature working as it would greatly simplify my life. So how about some help here Adobe. Even acknowledging the problem would be better than the current silence.

Blogging From Contribute CS3

I'm currently trialing Adobe CS3 prior to upgrading from Macromedia Studio 8. In particular I was keen to try out the blogging options in Contribute CS3. Which is exactly where I'm writing this post. This functionality was released a few months ago. But I prefer to manage upgrades as new suites are released. I'd also tried this from work but have never been able to create the connection. Now I know that the problem is probably proxy related as I had no problem making this connection from home. What's nice about posting from Contribute is that you are writing directly into your page with all the pages available styles. So you get a real feel for how the final post will appear. The Blogger editor is very sensitive to whitespace and so you can end up with some unexpectedly large spaces in your post.

One potential limitation is Bloggers use of labels instead of Tags. There is a drop down in Contribute listing all existing Labels and you select the ones you want to use. But there doesn't seem to be a mechanism for adding new Labels. Which means I'll probably need to edit this again in Blogger to add Contribute as a Label. But perhaps I'm just missing the option. It is very much a first try.