I have taken the last two days of this week off work to spend on replacing the chassis rail on the mustang. Cant wait till thats out of the way.

Noticed today that Sparkle has a release page on micro$oft. The funny thing is why would I use a product that the programmers of cant even achieve cross browser support. I mean seriously….you cant even click the see it in action buttons in firefox. Maybe it was intensional, maybe it was overlooked….but I seriously doubt that any modernday web-dev wouldnt test thier site in at least the two major browsers. Everthing is really screwed under firefox…the size of the demo tour the buttons even all the css in the left menu is wacky. How is it that every other major software company can manage this. SEE HERE   AND HERE

 Enough ranting…. I will get back to using visual studio to push out some more Micro$oft based software Flabulator.

I have had a really hard time pulling out some alpha out of the flash swf in C#!! Ill just release this version without the alpha me thinks and do it in c++. 

Studio 8 is out and the demos are on Macromedia.com get online (well you probably are already if reading this) and download the trials!!

Ill get some piccies of the mustang tomorow  

Alpha transparency of the flash OCX control has been nothing short of a pain in the a$$. So I downloaded the opensource Screenweaver to see how they were doing it. The original authors seem to be first drawing a bitmap to memory of the flash control with a white background, then a black background, comparing the two offsets( obviously if the colour of a pixel didnt change it has no alpha and you just have to work out the varying amount for those that did change). This seems like a really good way of doing it. Kinda smart really.

So I will first off try to reproduce this as a class in .Net and if not I will try hooking into the screenweaver DLL. But this just goes to show how openSource rocks!! Same as always If I get it done Ill release the source of the class. Stay tuned!!

Yep quick on tonight cause its late! I have added the API for flash to call nitification balloons on the taskbar Icon while the widgets are hidden. Flash can specify the Title, message and the time it stays on screen for.

This method has overloads for a couple of combinations. I only wish flash had overloads. I have spent most of the time trying to find a way to render the flash movies transperancy. MAn this part is hard. I have faked it for now by setting the movie background to the same color as the widget ummmm the big blue square that takes up the screen when you hit F6. This color is of course  configureable. So I still have to find a way to render the activex control transperancy ( please help if you know. I have a few more nights to spend on it and then I will release a beta….but Im still waiting if I should wait till flash 8 is released so that people can use the external interface. I still have to make a Fabultor class file which holds all the methods for things like showing the message balloons etc.

If you dont know what Flabulator is then look back over the last couple of posts. They should explain it all. 

Once again comments are welcome!!

Just a small update. I have added draging and resizing to the widgets. Im still having major issues with transparency so I might be stuck with square borders *sigh* windows and its non-conformity. If I get really enthused I will write a custom painter but man thats pretty hard out. In the image below you might be able to see the six little white boxes on the (black swf) gproject advertisment. These are for resizing and you can also drag the swf round the screen. Hit F6 and they all disapear down to an Icon in the taskbar. Next up tomorow night is to add the balloon notifyer interface for flash which will popup messages from the icon in the taskbar.

 The memory usage is looking like it will be a problem with too many widgets….but I will try using the flash 8 player and see how we go with the improvements they have made. 

You can also just see Ive added a "powered by Macromedia" logo in the background (hope you dont mind guys) which is a configureable image anlong with the background color/gradient in the xml. Any Comments and feature requests welcome guys!!!!

Ive had a couple of inquires about this and just to reasure everyone it will be completely free for non comercial use. Im just worried if I did sell it I would have to support it. This brings me to an interesting article I read on someones blog about the sustainability of small opensource projects. I think the best way to keep this alive once I have finished is to post it as a Tutorial for flash and .Net intergration. Especially seeing I will be using the new ExternalInterface class of flash 8. Im just worried that some of the c# stuff (although  not really advanced) might scare off some people.

Yep while sitting down with a home brew and watching the Kiwis thrash the Ozzies in the bledisloe cup…(had to get that on in ;o) ) I sat down and started prototyping an application in C#.

I run Konfabulator cause its as close to widgets ill get on a PC *Sigh*. But I got to wondering why no-one had made something like this for flash. I especially like the feature where you can hide the widgets and bring them up when you press a key i.e. F8. So I have made an application to do exactly this but for flash. At this point im quickly creating it in C# because well its quick! and I can get the classes sorted. Then I will go back and re-write it (with some help) in C++.

At the moment I have it minimizing to the task bar on keypress and loading in a single instance of a flash movie 

 Major points so far:
It can load swfs from the net or file system.
Im working on having a user defined image as the background(but standard gradient will be less resource intensive
Im working on creating an interface for flash to call one of those windows balloons in the task bar using Flash 8's external Interface, cause it sounds like a cool feature. this will give a means of notifing a user if say new news is availble.
Stores all settings in xml so the flash widgets can access that (xml docs location will be made available through API)

I have a bit to do to get it to a beta stage but when it arrives there I will release it for free. Unfortunately at this point it will require the .Net framework to be installed but like I said I will be refactoring it for c++ )

If anyone has any suggestions on functionality please leave comments as I am looking to add anything that sounds cool. Also if any .Net programmers have had any experience in embeding the activeX control could you please tell me how to make the movies background transparent?

Heres a screenShot of it running xsive.co.nz as a widget. 

Should be a cool little app.