A buddy of mine (and former coworker) is the primary Flash developer at Hasbro focused on their public internet properties which have slowly become very Flash-heavy. Anyway, he started his blog many months ago and he has started to put some good material up there for anyone interested in Flash development and ColdFusion integration into that. If these topics interest you, or you want to get into a discussion about how GoDaddy hosting sucks, you should check it out.

Geoff Stearns of deconcept has just posted about a new tool that uses his awesome swfObject to create a Flash-based form file upload tool called swfUpload. There is a demo on the homepage and it appears to work very nicely. Since it triggers functions on start, cancel, progress and complete, I assume you could use something like ajaxCFC to trigger CF processes that might be required to process the file after upload. Another nice feature is that if the user has Flash or JavaScript disabled, the tool degrades nicely into a standard HTML file upload field.

This post comes via a guest blogger (and friend), Shannon Hicks of Webapper.

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I found tons of posts across the web on how to do custom sorts of a dataGrid in Flash, but nothing about how to do it within CFFORM. It took me a little while to figure it out based on the Flash instructions, so I figured I'd write up a quick how-to.

A coworker of mine brought this issue to my attention. In my tests, you cannot modify a date object created using ActionScript in a Flash form. In his attempts and mine as well, no matter how we manipulate a date, it always comes back with the current date/time. For example:

The first alert will show today's date/time and the second exactly the same. I also tried other methods listed under the date class with the same effect. Perhaps it is because Flash forms disallow the new keyword? Anyone run into this issue? Anyone have a solution?

As part of my larger globalization project I am internationalizing one of our brand sites. In order to do so, I am using the sIFR 2.0 tool that I have previously raved about. In doing so I came across something that is obvious once you see it, but not so obvious until you run into the issue. This is that the fonts you use must be Unicode fonts in order to use this tool in a globalized site. I ran into this in adding a header with the Ä character. The font choice in this case (percolator) has that character but isn't Unicode. Since Flash converts all characters to UTF-8, this character will not show up no matter how many Glyphs I export (system.useCodepage doesn't seem to fix the problem either). The point is to be careful of your font choices when globalizing your application if you need to render these characters in Flash...unless someone has any ideas on a way to get around this?