Chris May

I recently wrote about how the Flickr Uploadr tool sucks, but the other part of that article was how the web upload tools for Flickr is very nice!

FancyUpload is a set of code using Flash/Javascript to perform out of band file uploads.

This is basically how Flickr allows you to queue files for upload in their web client, and it is very useful in this sense because it would be extremely painful to be forced to post every single image individually.

For me, I am more interested in the ability to post very large files without leaving the brower in a fashion that seems to make it look like it is "stuck" when really it is just uploading a giant file.

 

Youtube provides a object tag that you can include on your site to show the videos directly, w/o making the user leave your site.

However, I noticed that this object tag was not being activated with the objectswap technique which makes it so you don't have to click on the flash object to "activate" it in IE.

To fix this you need to include the type="application/x-shockwave-flash" in the object definition.

I am not sure why you need this, but if you leave it out, somehow IE removes the object from it's DOM.

If you allow a page to load w/o this "type" and then try to find, using javascript, any OBJECT tags and it will tell you there are none.

 

UPDATE:  Still having some problems... thinking the trick above is causing some new problems.

Recently Microsoft lost a lawsuit which required that they not "automatically" enable dynamic content in their browser, or something.

Whatever.  The result is that you now have to CLICK on flash swf files running in your browser before they will be "Activated".

The way to get around this is to use javascript to do the dirty work. 

Check out this link for a quick include that can help with the work around:

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/activex-activation-issue-ie

 

This is a pretty neat example of using Flash and ASP.NET, 2 technologies that I have expreience with.

http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/FlashUpload.asp

I will need to try this in one of my projects.

I really need to read this article to learn more about how flash MX 2004 does this...

I was really not impressed (disgusted) with how Flash MX does this kind of thing... or rather DOESN'T do this kind of thing.

Here are some articles about stuff with Flash and VB.
Article 1
Article 2

Article 2 is supposed to get rid of the right click that flash has.

So after putting in many late nights to complete this demo project, I find that it crashes on some WinXP machines, unless you resize the window.

Nice.

So what does Marcomedia say about large flash movies?

Don't make them "Big"

I've been working on some stuff with Flash and cryptography.

This site has some source code that implements the SHA1 hash method to produce a "one way" encryption method.

Here is an example of the RSA public key / private key encryption method if flash. (This won't work if you have Flash6 plugin, but once you recompile the source code, it works fine.)