Thought Den » application

Adobe Flash won’t pick up the phone to MySpace’s Javascript

Dan Course — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:55:23 +0000

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.

MySpace application, ExternalInterface Calls & SWFObject

Dan Course — Tue, 19 May 2009 16:55:45 +0000

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.

Keeping Tom Anderson at bay on MySpace

Dan Course — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:21:30 +0000

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!

Choosing your platform on MySpace

Dan Course — Fri, 08 May 2009 11:22:00 +0000

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.

Google App Engine, Hello Worl… Thought Den!

Dan Course — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:58:56 +0000

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/

This is all a ‘clever’ play on words around the programmers standard Hello World and this application at face value is clearly shameless use of thoroughly untested practice code to see who’ll say hi…

However, in the background it’s part of a serious feasibility study for Happy Packages exploring how useful Google’s App Engine will be to us.

If the test goes well we’ll be using the Engine to host the back-end cleverness for all the iPhone app interaction. The Engine basically means we’ll be able to handle squillions of user hits and database calls with less chance of lag and annoyingly slow interaction that a normal server would have.