God bless Flashtools.net >>
As any of you who’ve spoken with me recently know, I’ve been working like mad on a video project and a CD-ROM project to, among other things, distribute it. The process has really increased my Adobe Premiere and Macromedia Flash skills. As i mentioned in an earlier post, I had originally though of using Macromedia Authorware (a program I used a lot in grad school for CD-ROM development) to create this CD-ROM. But I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with Authorware for quite a few reasons (it’s slow, it’s barely functional on older machines, it’s programming logic is awkward), but even if that had not been the case, Aware is really too much gun for this job. So I decided to do it all in Flash via their cool little “flash player” and/or “projector” files (by which you can distribute your flash app as a standalone executable).
As I got deeper into the project, I kept running into quite a few limitations with the flash player. Since you can’t really embed quicktime movies within flash files, I wanted to be able to send a command to Windows to execute the .mov file with QuickTimePlayer. Unfortunately, while the Flash player does let you execute other applications, it doesn’t let you specify any arguments or files to be processed by those applications, which makes it fairly useless (I mean, how often do you really need to give the user the option of fireing up Notepad with a blank screen?). So I started surfing around and found all manner of expensive, proprietary applications which would extend Flash’s functionality in the ways I needed. But there was no time for any of that.
Then I found the coolest thing in the world: flashtools.net. The author has created a suite of small, freely distributable exe’s that you can use with Flash Player in order to give it the added functionality it needs to be a viable CD-ROM authoring tool. With these you can launch files with their default applications, pass arguments, connect to URLs, make FTP connections, navigate the file tree, control application windows, and do tons of other things I haven’t had time to mess with yet. But, thanks to these lovely apps, my Flash Player-based CD-ROM can now do all the things I had planned for it to do (and very elegantly, to boot). So I’m just posting to say thanks and to spread the word. It’s a really good world when people help one another out by creating useful tools and distributing them for free.