fifty_tons

A Few Words…

Hi
My name is Chris and I’m a freelance flash developer, music producer and graphic designer based in Iasi Romania. My products consist of templates, which I also break appart and sell them separately as components, at a smaller price of course. All my items are highly customizable, and they are XML driven, meaning that you don’t need Flash software, or flash/actionscript knowledge to edit them. All you need is a text editing software such as notepad, and follow the instructions in the manual that comes with each product. Really easy . Also, on this page, you will find some techincal faqs which I hope you’ll find useful.
Thanks for stopping by and happy navigating

FEATURED FILE BY FIFTY TONS

FEATURED FILES

PORTFOLIO

FLASH XML WEBSITE TEMPLATES

FLASH XML IMAGE / VIDEO GALLERIES

FLASH XML NEWS / BLOG READERS

FLASH XML TEXT SCROLLERS

FLASH XML BANNER ROTATORS / SLIDE SHOWS

UTILITIES

<<< TECHINCAL FAQS >>>

1. “Error Creating Flash movie file. Be sure the destination file is not locked or on a locked drive. Also, make sure the file name is not too long.” or “Error creating Flash movie. Destination directory does not exist. Change your publish settings.”

This is one of the most common “problems”. Well, it’s not a problem actually, it’s more of a missunderstanding . Basically your Flash can’t find the export folder. So simply go to File-Publish Settings and republish the swf movie by browsing to the desired path. That’s all . Sometimes this happens when the export folder is not manually created by you (eg: when you download a folder from a website)

2. HOW CAN I MAKE MY FILE SUPPORT SPECIAL CHARACTERS ?

Simply locate the text field that must display the special characters, and change the existing font to a font that supports the special characters you need. After that, embed the characters you want to display (the Embed button is located in the Properties panel)

3. WHEN I TRY TO FORMAT MY DYNAMIC TEXT IT DOESN ’T WORK . WHAT DO I DO ?

Well the most important thing is not to panic . Open the fla file that must support bold, italic, underlined or combinations of those(eg: bold+italic). Create a new layer anywhere, you can call it trick embed. Create an empty dynamic text field and press the Bold button and embed the characters you want. Same goes for italic, underlined or any combination (bold+italic, italic+underlined etc). Make sure that you make a different empty dynamic text field for each style. So if you want the bold, italic and bold+italic styles you will have 3 empty dynamic text fields, each embedded with one of the styles mentioned.

PLEASE NOTE that the fonts used in the formated empty dynamic text fields MUST BE the same with the font used in the dynamic text field that will actually display these styles.
After doing so, either add the new font style in your font preset in the CSS file (if it’s the case) or use the afferent tags (<b>, <i>, <u> or combinations) in the XML file.

EXAMPLE 1 : adding styles in a CSS text preset:
Text_Preset_4{
color:#808040;
font-size:10px;
font-weight:bold;
font-style:italic;
text-decoration:underline;
}

EXAMPLE 2 : Adding the afferent tags in the XML file:
<b>for bold text</b>
<i>for italic text</i>
<u>for underlined text</u>

COMBINATION OF STYLES :
<b><i>this is italic bold</i></b>

4. MY PHP CONTACT FORM DOESN ’T WORK . WHAT DO I DO ?

My guess (most likely) is that your server doesn’t support PHP . To check if your server supportd PHP do the following: Open Notepad or another text editor and copy/paste the following code:
<?php
phpinfo();
?>

Now save this file as PhpTest.php. Upload this file on your server and acess it (www.yourdomain.com/PhpTest.php). If you get the server’s PHP information then your server supports PHP , but if you get an error, it doesn’t. In that case, you should contact your server’s administrator and ask him to enable PHP on your server.

5. “Error creating flash movie. Be sure the file is not read only or open in another location…”

Right click on the swf movie and click Properties. Most likely the Read-only box is checked. Uncheck it. That’s it

6. MY FILE WORKS OFFLINE , BUT WHEN I UPLOADED IT ON MY SERVER NOTHING SHOWS UP , OR NONE OF MY IMAGES SHOW UP . WHAT CAN I DO ?

If your images won’t show up make sure that their extension is lowecase (jpg not JPG ). Also it’s a good habit to avoid spaces and uppercase extension in every file (xml, swf etc.). If you are certain that you have completed everything by the book, most likely there is a setting on your server that blocks the content, or there is a problem with your server. Please contact your server administrator and let him know about this problem.

7. HOW CAN I CENTER A MOVIECLIP ON STAGE ?

First, make sure that the movieclip’s registration point is in the middle. After that, copy/paste the following code:

Stage.scaleMode="noScale"
Stage.align="TL"
function alignObjects () {
Align (content_mc, "center")
}
function Align (target, position){
var Position:String;
Position=position
if (Position=="center"){
target._x=Stage.width/2
target._y=Stage.height/2
}
}
alignObjects()
myListener = new Object ();
myListener.onResize = function () {
alignObjects()
};
Stage.addListener (myListener);

Of course, you can play with it a bit. For example, if you want the movieclip to be 10 pixels above the center, add a +10 in the Y position of the movieclip, like this:
target._y=Stage.height/2
Same thing if you want it below, you add a -10, and it’s similar for the X coordinate as well.

8. HOW CAN I INSERT AN IMAGE IN AN HTML TEXT FIELD ?

<img src="my_image.jpg" width="150" height="200" />

It’s a good practice, although not mandatory, to specify the dimensions of the image that will load inside a HTML text field, so flash can save up the space required for that. That’s mostly useful when the HTML text need scrolling, if the dimensions are not specified, flash will not scroll through the whole image, because it doesn’t know how much to scroll.

<<< COMMON QUESTIONS – VIDEO TUTORIALS >>>

How to add a SWF to an HTML
XML Explained
Using Special Characters Like Õ, Ä, and Ü