Really, Really Bad (damned irresponsible) Design Decisions

Every once in awhile, I receive postcards and such from my undergraduate institution, Worcester State College. I hold a BA in Communications Media from this school and have no complaints about the degree or the classes I took while a student there. I do, however, die a little inside each time I see one of the horrid visual clusterf@#ks that always accompany these publications. Below is a good example of what I’m talking about:

Got this one when I arrived home this evening. So we have a horrible stitch-job of seemingly random people all crammed together in what might pass for a 10 year old child’s first Photoshop project. That’s something I’ve learned to live with. Not everyone can design well, some people can’t design at all. Some people have no business even contemplating design. No big deal, right? Let’s look a little closer:

Wait a minute… the child… is that her name and a set of phone numbers taped to her chest? Oh yeah it is… wow. You can’t see it here as I’ve modified the image to remove the phone numbers- but sure as I sit here holding this abomination in my hands… you can read the numbers clear as day.

How does something like this get past the designer? How does it get past the approval process? How about the printer? No red flags anywhere along that chain, people??? Then they add the other girl staring directly into the name tag? Still nothing? How about now that I’ve drawn a green, glowing line-of-sight from her eyeball to the phone numbers? Ahhh… now someone might catch it.

Un-believable.

Runtime Armatures in Flash CS4

I have such terrible luck with Runtime Armatures in Flash CS4. It’s really not funny anymore.

Most recently stumbled across the following compilation error (fatal warning?) when working with the “New Flash Component” feature of Flash Builder 4:

Warning: 5002: The main timeline’s frame scripts have been ignored because a compiled clip contains a definition for fl.livepreview.LivePreviewParent. To override the fl.livepreview.LivePreviewParent definition, place a custom class file within your classpath.

Obviously, Flash is generating code for the Runtime Armature which is conflicting with code for the Flash Component for use in Flash Builder. Ugh…

I’m working on some demos for my FITC presentation during the MAX unconference in October. This is by no means a show stopper but what an annoyance… Half the time when working with Runtime Armatures in CS4, Flash will just totally crash and burn. I have great luck with Armatures during authoring- the runtime stuff just always seems to bite me.

Bug filed:
http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-22221

UPDATE: I have confirmation that this is fixed in Flash CS5.

The Flash Platform???

WTF? Wasn’t the “Flash Platform” christened back in the Macromedia days? I’ve been calling it that ever since Macromedia released their original declarative whitepaper in October 2005…

Realizing that Flash is a better name than Flex for a platform, Adobe is now referring to everything it does related to Flash (including the Flash Player, Adobe AIR, Flex developer tools, and Flash media servers) as the Flash Platform.

Picked up via Chuck Freedman.

Audiophile 2496 x64 Rant

Okay- this is a pure rant with nothing of value to anyone but myself.

I’ve been using an M-Audio Delta Audiophile 2496 for years now in 32-bit systems: both Windows XP and Vista.  This is a great card- massive clarity above anything else I’ve ever tried.  I’ve produced a ton of projects off of this card and it is tightly integrated into my studio cabling at this point.

Recently, I upgraded my hardware and took advantage of 8GB of RAM.  To actually utilize that amount of RAM, you need a 64-bit OS. The whole point of this rant is that M-Audio still do not have any drivers for this card for 64-bit Vista.  They don’t have any public beta drivers either- the drivers in private beta.

I signed up for the beta but am not holding my hopes very high.  I suppose I can just deal with onboard audio until they release the drivers- but I wouldn’t want to actually record anything using that…

Just a real cramp in my gut.  Let’s have at them drivers, already!

What’s Up with Flash Player 10 Final???

It seems a lot has changed from the release candidates to the final version- a lot of things people did not expect.  For instance, last minute surprise changes to the Sound API… and then the previously announced security changes that Adobe has, in fairness, warned us about since Flash Player 9.

I’ve stumbled across something that I cannot understand in one of our Java applications.  This is something that worked fine in 10.0.0.525 but is now broken in 10.0.12.36:

Simply put- a SWF (any SWF) that has loaded just fine in all previous versions of the Flash Player (including FP10 RC builds) now completely fails to load.  I’ve looked at a number of different things but cannot figure this one out!

I’ll update this as I find answers.