Sometimes we’ve hit a road-block when we’re trying to make Flash talk to the External Interface in our MySpace applications.

The Flash is having a great time and is more than happy to call Javascript with ExternalInterface when it wants. But when Javascript wants to chat back… beep beep. “Please leave a message”.

Flash appears to ignore the call, and leaves Javascipt in an error state and needing ice-cream.

To help you avoid that little relationship problem here’s the fix to the problem. Add the following to your code,

System.security.allowDomain(”*.msappspace.com”);
System.security.allowDomain(”*.yourdomain.co.uk”);

Flash’s Sandbox is set to divert all calls by default and blocks any chat. However as soon as you’ve added the allowDomain. Flash shouts, “HELLO!”, and it’s all back on again.

One big happy social networking family.

We’ve been playing around with MySpace Application Surfaces to get Flash AS2 to talk to a Javascript Interface. It’s been a long day….

Here are our findings for any other Flash & MySpace Developers.

- ExternalInterface + SWFObject + iFrame will not work. Do not spend 4 hours refreshing your browser and re-testing. It will not work. There are also no tutorials to sort it out either.

- getURL is just plain dirty. Don’t do it.

The final solution we settled on is, don’t use SwfObject. Just have a plain Object/Embed tag. Then External Interface can talk to all the relevant parties.

Download our MySpace files (put into the Canvas Surface) and see what we’ve done.

Just popping through some sample code for a myspace application and saw this.

Apparently some apps don’t want the MySpace Founder mr Tom Anderson playing their game!

So we’re staring to develop a MySpace application with Team Rubber, which is all good news. Basically it means we get to play with a new technology and they get to have their cool application benefit from the power of a social network.

However, not all is rosy. At the first step we’re presented with the choice, “Do you want to develop with OpenSocial or MySpaceID?”.

What? Which one do we choose! Surely like every other social platform, api or online do-hickey you just sign-up, ignore the instructions till it breaks then code like the wind?

It’s not even like the bullet points help you make a decision. Both offer their positives, but not weighted against each others.

To be honest why can’t we just have both? Surely, we could just use OpenSocial as a base and then add on any MySpaceID stuff as it goes?

Nope. One or t’other.

Come and sign our Hello World Thought Den book. It can even be a little rude if you want!

http://hello-thought-den.appspot.com/

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