No, not like that, though I’ve seen people give Flash the finger far too many times. In our case we want the cursor to change to the finger cursor. This is the same cursor you would get when hovering over a link. By default this is turned off for MovieClips. To enable it, we add this line of Actionscript for the movieclip:

Simply take your MovieClip’s instance name and set the attribute buttonMode to true. Now when you publish your movie, rolling over the MovieClip changes your cursor.

Here’s where it gets tricky. Let’s say there’s a MovieClip in your library that needs to be used several times to contain text, such as a list of buttons. You set up the MovieClip as a class to re-use, you pull in the XML content to each class using a for loop, and then add it to the stage with buttonMode set to true. Now here comes the pain in the neck. When you hover the mouse over the MovieClip you get the cursor change, but when you move the mouse over the part of the MovieClip with the text, bye-bye cursor change.

This result is due the default behavior of text with the cursor. To disable this behavior, set the textfield inside the MovieClip to this:

Presto! Now your MovieClip behaves like a button, the cursor is not affected by the text, and you don’t have to give Flash the finger.

Luckily, bad clients relationships haven’t happened to us (knocking on wood), but it’s obviously happening to others from the recent app and video being posted online recently.

iMust

First up is iMust, an iPhone app from Happy Gravity Media/Blitz Media. The iMust app is critical if you need to say something during a meeting, but don’t know exactly what to say. Actually, it’s what not to say. This tongue-in-cheek app pipes out sound bites that are sure to infuriate the party on the other side of the table. Here’s a screengrab:

Get the app on iTunes. It’s FREE!

The Vendor/Client Relationship in a Real World Situation

A funny take on how the vendor/client relationship would translate into real world situations.

Make the Logo Bigger

Lastly, there is this gem that appeared a few years ago. Designers spend so much time making logos fit nicely into their designs only to have clients foil them with the request to “Make the Logo Bigger”.
Download “Make the Logo Bigger”

New Blackmagic drivers were released today, so I was excited to try them out. I thought I was going to be able to use CS4 with it, but after seeing this in the system settings for my Blackmagic Intensity card, I knew something was amiss.

The Intensity card is HDMI only, while the Intensity Pro has a breakout cable for analog connections. Neither has SDI. My email into tech support got this response:

We know, it was an error in the compiling of the driver. That should be fixed shortly, please uninstall that driver version and use the older version until we are able to fix that. It shouldn’t take over day or so to get that straightened out.

So Blackmagic knew about it and released the drivers anyway. Oh, and downgrading doesn’t do anything either as I need CS4 compatibility. The waiting game continues…

Blackmagic Design’s Intensity card is cheap, easy to use, and mighty powerful. You can preview video in After Effects, Premiere, Photoshop, etc. all using this card’s HDMI out. In Photoshop send a still to the monitor and preview it live there. Paint a little bit, export again, and see the change.  It also has HDMI in so you can capture uncompressed HD from a HDV camera like the Canon HV20. It’s pretty slick. That is, when it’s compatible with your software. After installing the CS4 Master Collection this little nugget reared its head when sending video out to my HD monitor.

An email to BMD support yielded this response:

"We are waiting for one last thing from Adobe to be sorted and then we should
be able to finalize our CS4 drivers. I’ve heard that this hopefully will
happen soon and then once we get that last issue ironed out the CS4 drivers
should be released. No timeframe for when that will happen but hopefully
soon."

So now I’m high and dry until Adobe gets itself in gear. Or I could fork out the cash for Final Cut Studio.

UPDATE: BMD just released the drivers for Windows. What about your Mac customers?

Here’s the setup: You’re looking to use Maya to export your geometry to use in your Papervision3D projects. For Mac users this is a problem since the plugin was not compiled correctly in the most recent release for Maya 2009. Maya 2008 and previous work just fine but Maya 2009 was installed using a dynamic library, so it’s fubar to the masses… until now. I figured out how to get it working after many a trial and error, but you’ll need some hard drive space and some patience to see this through. What we’re going to do is supply the missing library by installing XCode and the Boost Library to get the plug-in to work. So until the powers that be fix it, below is the workaround to get back in business.

What you’ll need:

• A working copy of Maya 2009. There’s a trial version available as well.
  
• XCode (You’ll need the latest release, not what’s on the Leopard DVD- it won’t work in this case.)
• The Boost Library – Version 1.36.0
• COLLADAMaya Plugin 0.8.2
  

The entire process will take less than an hour, but the user involvement is rather low.

1. Install COLLADAMaya Plug-in
   Download the Maya plug-in disc image, mount, and install using the supplied package. Once the plug-in is installed, open Maya and navigate to Window –> Settings/Preferences –> Plug-in Manager. You will see a list of all available plug-ins. Choose “Loaded” next to COLLADAMaya.bundle.

   

   You’ll notice you receive an error, like this:

   Library not loaded: libboost_filesystem-xgcc40-mt-1_36.dylib
   Referenced from: /Users/Shared/Autodesk/maya/2009/plug-ins/COLLADAMaya.bundle
   

   This is the error we’re going to fix in the next steps.

2. Install XCode
   Download the XCode image from Apple’s Developer site. It’s about 1GB in size. The default settings are all you need if you don’t plan on doing anything else with it. This is the biggest issue with this workaround. It will take up about 1GB of space.
3. Install the Boost Library
   Download the Boost Library 1.36.0. Newer libraries may work, but this is the library that the plugin was compiled against in the development stage. Select the version that ends in .tar.gz. This made a difference for me, though I’m not exactly sure why. I recommend you extract the contents to the Desktop. Open Terminal, which can be found in /Applications/Utilities. To get going you need to configure the installation procedure before installing.

   In the terminal you’ll need to navigate to the Boost folder on the Desktop. Obviously if you extracted elsewhere, navigate there. Here are some Terminal commands for rookies. Once you have successfully navigated inside the Boost folder, type:

   ./configure

   This will start the configuration script. It takes a minute or two to complete. Once complete, type:

   sudo make install

   Enter your password and hit enter. Now is the time for a break, especially since it takes about 20 minutes to unpack these files. When it finally finishes you will be given a message that the library was successfully installed.

4. Re-Enable Plug-in
   Return to Maya and re-enable the plug-in. See Step 1 to review. You should not get an error message this time around. Success!

Now you are free to model and export your your work to COLLADA for use in your Papervision3D Flash projects. Here are the settings I use to export my work:

For those just getting their feet wet in Papervision3D and would like to see how their work looks in a Flash movie, try out Mr. doob’s Papervision3D Previewer.

I hope this post is helpful to those few users who were in my shoes. Leave a comment and let me know how it worked out.