I happened to run into this very nice tool on the Net. This tiny little application might make my life a little more easier then it was before.

The app i am talking about is the Flash Shell Extension. What it does exactly (and the proces of building and developing the app) can be read on the site of the creator.

What the app does is that it adds an extra option to your right mouse button context menu. With this menu you can republish .fla files with 1 click. The tiny application then opens Macromedia Flash and exports the .fla. Although the opening and closing of Flash for each and every action you do with the app might be a little overkill, it is a nice addition to your arsenal of flash tools though.

Well, couldn’t help but love the example i saw at simplebits . Not only do the minitabs look great to my taste, they also make a great usability improvement to the site. Out goes the old smelly, dusty, navigation. And in comes the new one ;)

The tabs give a good sense of positioning to the readers and even help build up the mental model of the site structure. So applaud for the people at simplebits. I have no idea if they came up with the idea or not, but what the heck, i copied it from them anyway. So all throw your hands full of credit over to them :). Wanna see their post?

If you ever come in a situation where you want to add a preloader to your Actionscript 2.0 orientated applications, and you have also been using components, you might hit the same problem i did, components are not loading correctly.

If you want to preload your AS2.0 app, you need to change the publish settings and change the ‘export script to frame x’ setting to anything greater then 1. (otherwise you will find your users download xx Kb of as code before they see the actual preload clip.).

When you change this option, the AS2.0 code for the components are placed in that frame also. And that is where the problems come in.

The flash components have a default setting per component which says ‘export in first frame’. So your components are being exported in frame 1 default, and they are screwed up because their as2.0 classes are not available yet. The solution is simple yet effective. Change the properties of each component in your library and uncheck the ‘export in first frame switch’. Everything should work great now.

For more infor see http://www.person13.com.