If you’re connecting to a webservice through Flash, apparently just having

<allow-access-from domain="*"/>

is not enough for the call to work.

You also need

<allow-http-request-headers-from domain="*" headers="*" secure="false"/>

You learn something new everyday.  Knowing this would have saved me a few hours of keyboard pounding.  And drinking.

Here’s something fun to tide you over for now…

From October 30, 2011

This is completely no help: http://help.adobe.com/…/ColorMatrix.html.  The default values listed for things like SetBrightnessMatrix, SetContrastMatrix, etc. are completely full of shit.

So after playing with it for a few hours, here are the ACTUAL values that these functions use:

SetBrightnessMatrix – takes a value from -255 to 255.  0 is the midpoint, ie. passing in 0 will do nothing.

SetSaturationMatrix – this appears to be a multiplier.  So passing in 1 will leave the saturation alone, passing in 0.5 will decrease the saturation, and passing in 1.5 will increase the saturation.

SetContrastMatrix – takes a value from 0 to 255, with (255/2) being the midpoint.

I hope this saves you a few hours of pain.

On a side note, why do these functions start with Caps when everything else in AS3 would be defined like “setContrastMatrix”?  What the fuck, Adobe?

For me, that brought back a flood of memories for this:

(yes those are the original 3.5″ disks!)

WAY WAY WAY before I got into Flash, there was Disney’s The Animation Studio.  I have fond memories of learning about Squash n’ Stretch and various other animation techniques used by actual Disney animators!  Reading the manual for this was like opening some magic tome full of ancient wisdom passed on directly from Walt Disney, to the technical writer who wrote the manual, to my 15 year-old self.

I still remember creating a cartoon for my Grade 11 World Religions class.  Of course, back then, there was no way to output from your computer to a tv (at least no way accessible to a 15 year-old animation geek).  So after drawing a cartoon on my computer, I filmed the monitor with my dad’s camcorder, then transferred that to VHS so that I could play it back during my presentation.  Old-school!

• updating a bitmap in the library would sometimes revert back to the original bitmap after closing/re-opening.
• occasionally timeline animation within a library symbol would disappear upon closing/re-opening.
• installed components would sometimes revert back to older versions (ie. Doubleclick’s VideoPlayer component) sporadically.

Anyhow, I stumbled on this link this morning which would go a long way towards explaining the buggy behaviour:

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/000/d9bbd9d4.html

Don’t know if that’s the absolute answer, but it makes sense.
Bottom line: working off the network in flash = bad.

Some thoughts.

Starting this up because I had a Drupal site that got infested with Spam posts.  We had created the Drupal version of the site with the naive idea that we’d update it with new work all the time.  2 years and no updates later, here we are.  Hopefully, WordPress will be less attractive to the Spambots.

I also find that I need a place to document random work things like visual experiments, Flash issues that I’ve encountered, etc.

I will probably not make another entry for at least 6 months.

Or I will go through a spurt of updates at the very beginning, then leave it for a year.

Yippee!