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NOAM1991
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Should I Code Custom Playlists for Pro?

Jul 24, 2012 3:40 PM

Tags: #help #text #cs5.5 #ios #ipad #action_script_3 #actionscript #flash_cs5 #flash_cs5.5 #animation

I've recently finished animations that act as playlists for my news app, but Ive been wondering If I should get someone to code xml playlists instead. There are eight playlists, and each with its own specfic feed. For now we are just working with text, but eventually plan on moving to video reports.

 

 

Would it be easier to just write out the texts, and copy and paste them into the flash document? Or should I create a cusomt playlist that gets it directly from a feed?

350 Views   2 Replies   Latest reply: sinious, Jul 25, 2012 8:17 AM
 
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  • Rob Dillon
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    1. Rob Dillon,
    Jul 25, 2012 6:09 AM   in reply to NOAM1991
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    If the content of these feeds is going to change over time, then you probably want to keep this content as a separate file and let Flash import and display it. Its relatively trivial to update an xml or text file when the content changes. Its a lot more work to edit the Flash movie to include this new content and then create the new .swf and upload that .swf to your server.

     
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  • sinious
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    2. sinious,
    Jul 25, 2012 8:17 AM   in reply to NOAM1991
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    While it's easier to edit XML, you get easily get into multi-lingual issues quickly. Flash and embedded fonts has always been a huge issue, even to this day.

     

    If you dynamically read content from XML and create the TextFields to display the content you'll either need to embed the font or use the users own fonts (device fonts). If you have any feeds with exotic symbols (greet beta, alpha, you get the idea) you need to be sure your embedded font supports it or characters won't show up. Using device fonts will default a user to system fonts but in some cases aren't antialiased, look poor and often the OS chooses a basic font which can look ugly.

     

    By doing your text in flash and keeping it static you're avoiding all these issues. It's something to consider.

     

    If you ever need to embed a large character set like Japanese, Cryllic, Korean or (oh man) Traditional or Simplfied Chinese then you either need to use ugly device fonts or offer a font preloader because they're 20,000+ glyphs and can easily be 10-20MB just to download the font.

     

    I to a ton of localization and it's a constant plague.

     
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