Have you ever come across a tool that, once you start using it you wonder how you ever did without? The JSFL Flash Preloader Fix made by Grant Skinner is one of them. It’s such a time saver!

Ever have preloaders get stuck, because of event sounds or movieclips that are loaded into frame 1 of your movie? Hopefully in the new version of Flash there is a better way to export assets, but as of yet, you still have to export them manually into frame 2 of your movies. This script will do it automatically for you! You can download the script here.

We are pre-ordering the new Adobe Creative Suite CS3 on April 16th! This means that we will be transitioning to Flash CS3, and Actionscript 3.0 in between projects. Usually we wait until a new version has had some time to “bug-out”, but we can’t wait on the new Flash CS3- it will come with new drawing tools, and finally give us the pen tool that Illustrator has in Flash! Needless to say it will save us tons of production time, and we can’t wait.

This also means that we will officially not be publishing for the Flash Player 7 anymore. Flash 8 and Flash Player 8/9 has had large improvements made to accessibility. We will bundle all our Flash content with a Flash sniffer, that will direct the user to the new Flash Player download, if they need it to view the content. We will test all our content for Flash Players 8 and 9.

Adobe Flash CS3 Professional Overview

Having a good font management system in place is invaluable, both for tracking and managing fonts and to fight Font Fatigue. I have actually worked for companies in the past, that had no font management system in place at all. I used to keep the fonts in folders, but never de-installed. Looking back on that, I cannot imagine work without a font manager anymore!

I have tried out all the main font management tools, including Suitcase and Font Agent Pro, but even the most expensive seemed basic at best. Then I tried out MainType from High-Logic and I was in font heaven! The main screen is customizable, so you can adjust it to what you need to see for each font.  One window shows you all the installed fonts, seperately from the fonts that you can group- either per project or per client. You can search fonts depending on the characteristics, and it even exports groups of fonts to HTML for easy viewing. In the same window, you can view typographic data per typehouse, the font character set and a sample text. You can also easily organize the fonts per typehouse or per type (serif/ sans serif/ handwritten) within a group as well. It also identifies broken font files for you.

For the best font workflow, try out MainType! You can purchase it from High-Logic or try out the demo version.

Ever get tired of installing and de-installing Flash Players for testing? This free downloadable extension for Firefox by Sephiroth is the answer!

You can download the extension here. Then open Firefox, and go to Tools > Add Ons, and drag and drop the extension file in the window to install it. Then all you have to do is open the file that you want to test, and switch from Flash Player to Flash Player by using the button in the lower right hand corner.

If you really want to make sure, that your Flash file will run on Flash Player 7, with all the new features that Flash 8 offers, just save out your file as a Flash MX file. If you have anything that will not run for Flash Player 7, it will give you a warning. Save it, and publish it, and your final file should run fine on Flash Player 7.