MAX 2005: Using Flash and Director Together

Mark Jonkman started by showing the differences between of Flash and Director. Sample uses of Flash in Director included interface components, Director as a shell around a Flash movie, and a Flash movie as an integral component of an application made in Director.

Mark showed a lot of examples of Flash use in Director, and talked about how you can actually debug Flash by using the Director Message window — accessing variables inside of the running Flash member. He also took a look at the history of Flash and Director communication, from Director 6 to 10. Then he concentrated on the modern method used in the Flash 7 Xtra. Things like direct access to properties and function and using setCallBack().

Mark’s talk is actually one of the most technical ones I’ve seen at the show. Instead of just telling us what “could be done”, Mark is actually naming the commands and showing code examples. This could be a course or mini-book on Director-Flash communication.

For the upcoming Flash 8 Xtra, Mark mentioned probable improvements like the use of alpha video, performance improvements, access to bitmap mage data, effects and blend modes, and an unnamed “convert” feature which can pass binary and image data back and forth.

Mark showed an example of using the Flash Xtra to bring up a dialog box to browse for a file and then upload it to a server. Flash 8 Xtra functionality. This could replace the use of Xtras for such things.