FlashICT.net

I’ve put together a quick forum post suggesting why I think Flash CS4 is going to be a singificant update for schools. See the EffectiveICT.co.uk forum

Basically, I think the tweening improvements together with the new 3D tools will make the whole program so much better for students to use. I’ll try to put together some further ideas here in the near future.

Don’t get me wrong – my wife and I love the Mac and find Apple’s products brilliant. However, in response to my post yesterday about the lack of Flash Brian McBride made a great comment:

It is about time someone runs down the isle past the memorized drones and smashes the Apple/Jobs screen with a hammer. Didn’t someone do that before? wasn’t someone thinking different and encouraging diversity?

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That really made me think – the famous Apple ad from 1984 really is so similar to events at Apple’ WWDC.

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Queues of people shuffling in
Drones sitting in the audience, taking in every word
The leader is at the front / on screen giving out instructions

Which do those three points really describe?

Don’t get me wrong though – I am extremely keen and interested in new technology but we do need to be careful to examine every new development with ‘positive criticism’. It looks like it is very easy to get carried away at the WWDC.

Thanks Brian for making me look at the issue slightly differently. How spookily close the 1984 Mac advert now is to reality.

With the latest details about the iPhone from the Apple WWDC today, it made me consider the main thing that I feel the iPhone lacks – support for Flash. With Apple rolling out the developers, the example apps along with all the marketing and “I want one now” encouragement, Flash is losing out.

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Where is Adobe Flash, Air and everything else? There have been lots of ’sort-of’ promises, even some from Adobe themselves. However, I think one thing is clear – support for Flash is not going to appear on the iPhone. This is nothing short of a disaster for Adobe. The fantastic Flash tool is seriously missing out by not being part of the iPhone.

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I think the only way Flash support will appear on the iPhone is if Adobe change the way Flash works. They need to remove the right-click menu. Currently the functionality of the iPhone and iPod touch doesn’t even support Flash. Similarly, Adobe don’t actually have a need – or probably even a desire to get Flash working on an iPhone interface. The current setup means they control all apps, which certainly wouldn’t be the case if Flash was supported.

Whilst Silverlight is floundering in its use, the iPhone is going to fly – especially if the new much lower pricing appears in other countries across the world too. This must be of great concern to Adobe – how can Flash support be added to the iPhone? Flash is a fantastic tool and I’d love to be able use my Flash games on the iPod touch. They could work so well. I just hope Flash doesn’t miss out on all the new devices that the iPhone era will usher in.

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Come on Adobe – release some fantastic news about how you’ve got Flash working on the new device. I think the main problem is that there isn’t much of a requirement on Apple’s behalf. Then again, they have now added Exchange – would Flash be the next most popular development? I think so…

I’ll post in more depth as soon as I can, but this post is just to announce my delight with the release of my new (and free) educational game – Teacher Invaders. You can download the beta version just by registering on my ContentGenerator.net forums.

I’ll upload an example game shortly so you can have a go – or read the thoughts of those who have tried out test versions already.

It is allows students (and anyone really) to play a Space Invaders clone against the clock. To earn more game time the player has to answer a question every 10 seconds.

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My generator program allows anyone to generate their own versions – you enter the question data, select your settings and press generate. A custom .swf (or .zip) is then produced. The SCORM options mean that your games can be imported into a Virtual Learning Environment such as Moodle.

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As with all my developments for ContentGenerator.net this started out as something which I thought would be rapid to develop but then has ended up taking ages. Initially I had difficulty adapting the original game, used with permission from Paul Neave, so it would pause correctly. This was soon overcome though.

I had a version which I got my students to use last year for their revision. See: http://www.reviseict.co.uk/revision/invaders.shtml. However, I decided to move away from this because I didn’t want to be sued by Taito, the owners of the Space Invaders copyright. I also discovered several bugs which simply weren’t noticable in my original version, but then took ages to fix.

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$The \'Head\' Teacher Invader$ Mrs Maths

I thus got some graphics designed – and these were absolutely fantastic. I was delighted with how effective these looked and this is such an indication of how wise it is to get a professional designer on board when you want something done properly. The best thing about it was that the designer also loved the game – so his enthusiasm flowed through his work.

The timer that I used – one I purchased from FlashDen – was great when used once (i.e. for the initial countdown) but because it used a setInverval function it kept leaving these running every time it was run. Thus after a few goes the game slowed down considerably and the timing messed up. What was the most frustrating was that my intial work didn’t have this error so I was in the unenviable situation that as I developed the game further it actually got worse I spent hours trying to fix this – and it even got to the stage where it works flawlessly in our fast PC but then failed on our fast iMac. I just couldn’t work it out – until the penny dropped about the problems with setInterval.

The Client move In the end I wrote my own timer completely so I had total control over it and it didn’t start up / stop at strange moments. It was an enormous development effort though. It seems a bit daft / crass me saying that now it is done but the hassle I went through programming all of this was genuinely enormous. I’ll post further details later on, but as previously mentioned, you can download the current beta from the ContentGenerator.net forums.

After a long absence – basically because this site is the last website that I end up updating and I haven’t ended up updating many of my sites recently – I’ve updated this site. More to do with Wordpress hacking exploits but also to do with the latest version of Wordpress which continues to be a fantastic tool.

My main focus on my Flash work is the ContentGenerator.net website. This is still growing fantastically well, currently with over 12,200 registered forum members. I’ve been very pleased with the work related to SCORM and Moodle – but am still working extremely hard to produce finished versions. If you are interested, head over to the ContentGenerator.net forum for more.

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I’ve also got an entirely new game which I plan to release extremely soon – Teacher Invaders. Basically Space Invaders but with some evil-alien-teacher-style graphics. See a sample below – designed for me by the brilliant Iconshock .

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Example alien from Teacher Invaders

Anyway – just a quick post to update the site. More soon

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Edit: Despite the fact I was very pleased with this theme – it looks like it is impossible to view previous comments (despite them appearing in the ‘recent’ comments) box near the top-right. Looks like I’ll have to find another theme instead.

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Not an event I was able to attend because I was teaching, but it looked really good. A number of sessions have now been uploaded so you can watch it again. Not as wide ranging as actually being there, but some in-depth, interesting and detailed presentations are all online.

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Also some very clever use of Flash on the actual site – extra bits and pieces to make the site come alive, but also Flash-based applications that helped you see how the event is organised and what was on. This is Flash being used in a practical and useful way – not trying to be ‘Flashy’ but enabling the end user to get more out of the page in as straightforward a way as possible.

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So – have a good look around!

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Practice Paper screenshot

I’ve been developing a Flash-based application for my websites called ‘Practice Paper’ for over two years now. The first one was on my ReviseICT.co.uk site, which I then developed further to appear on my SchoolHistory.co.uk site. Basic printing was on offer, but it didn’t work very well.

Last year I posted extensively about the issues I was facing – see this post, also titled ‘Printing in Flash 8′ – the basic conclusion was that if you printed text from Flash everything would work out fine unless you wanted to print more than one page. Then the trouble starts – I tried an exhastive number of solutions and not one worked….

Or did it? Well, in some respects – no it didn’t at all. As my programs are used directly by students I work incredibly hard to make sure that they work as simply and as clearly as possible. The immense benefit of using Flash for educational tools is that you can wrap everything up in a single .swf and upload, share or save this file anywhere.

Runaway Bride psp What I ended up doing with Practice Paper was to develop an extremely complex solution which breaks out of just using a single .swf. I was really annoyed by this but I’m utterly convinced for the requirements of the application I have taken the most appropriate action.

Basically, the Practice Paper application was working well unless someone tried to print more than one standard page of text. I simply couldn’t leave this bug in the finished program as it would be a frequent occurance that a student would print more than one page. American Graffiti rip

The solution was to get Flash to generate a pop-up .html window with the text that needed to be printed. Yet what seemed quite a simple solution turned into an utter coding nightmare with the following issues:

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Creating a pop-up window from Flash – by default pop-up windows are blocked
Flash needs a JavaScript wrapper (or equivalent) to trigger a pop-up window
Yet this wasn’t just a matter of triggering a pop-up window – here a unique window with the text from Flash has to be generated
Flash has to send the data (i.e. what the student has written) to the newly generated JavaScript window
There has to be an easy way for a student to print their work – the main aim
Yet to print the work without requring further use intervention would require even more coding.

I did manage to get it working – but it took ages and hours of fruitless work. Breaking out from using a single .swf file was the only solution that I found but this caused headaches at even the earliest stage – I had to make sure that the .swf file was correctly embedded without needing additional clicks ‘to activate’. To pass data from Flash to JavaScript to the new window meant each working part has to be correctly and carefully labelled.

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Added to all this I found that the best way to store ‘model answers’ – which are presented to the user when then submit their own work – was to store these within the .html page that my application generates. Thus to make the application work I send data via JavaScript to Flash but then when someone wants to print their work the data is sent back from Flash to JavaScript. This rapidly became incredibly complex.

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The Village video To cut a very long story short you can firstly see why I haven’t been posting to this blog that frequently, but I have now got the application working.

As with all my ContentGenerator.net programs, the teacher (or other user) adds their own content using Flash-based interface that runs as a quasi-projector file on the desktop. When they had added all their content they press ‘generate’ to create the finished application. Normally this generates a .swf file that can be used on its own, together with an .html file to embed the application correctly. Not so with Practice Paper…. it uses the following files:

.swf file – this is a custom .swf that contains the title, details and information about the exercise
.html file – again, a custom file this .html file is packed fully with question data – all urlencoded and potentially extremely long (view the source of the example above)
.js file – this is a fixed .js file (i.e. it isn’t changed at all when the application is generated). This JavaScript file contains a large amount of code. It is made up of the code that allows Flash to send data to JavaScript, which in the end with IE7’s communication issues came down to using FSCommand. It also contains code to create a unique JavaScript pop-up window, together with a small amount of CSS to create a fake information bar option to print the text. It also contains the fantastic SWFObject code to get the .swf file working and communicating correctly without any additional hassles.

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The final solution, whilst appearing contrived and uncomfortable does work. The JavaScript is hidden away in one file, and the .html file contains an extensive amount of data. They key test was with students – with this latest version they were just able to use it – no hassles with printing and it just works!

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download Bad Taste movie daybreakers download Very interesting article from the Guardian [click the link above] – makes some excellent comments and helps explain why Flash is such a useful tool. It isn’t detailed enough to cover the uses in Education (which is what my blog is about) but it doesn’t take much to fill the gaps in.

Whilst I’m talking about the Guardian – I was delighted that my SchoolHistory.co.uk website was featured as one of the top 10 picks for revision websites a few weeks ago.

Alongside public and commercial services, teachers’ own internet sites stand up well. Students, and indeed publishers, could learn from them. For instance, schoolhistory.co.uk shows one teacher’s talent for creating fun activities to teach his subject….

Anchors Aweigh hd … This teacher’s site outshines most of the commercial offerings. Someone’s joy and skill in their subject is evident from its cocktail of quizzes, games and activity that need more than a superficial click to do. For example, lessons are punctuated by questions that demand answers before you’re allowed to move on. For revision lessons, look out for the excellent and challenging “interactive diagrams” where you have to build a topic map for yourself.

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See the online version for the full report Nighthawks movie .

I haven’t posted on this blog for absolutely ages – simply because I’ve been too busy. I’ve got many developments that I’ve been working on but because they are all still in progress I need to spend what limited time I’ve got finishing them off. As I have time I want to explain how:

How I finally got my Practice Paper application working – and most importantly – printing from Flash.
The coding behind my latest game – En Garde
Uses of Flash within education – ideas and suggestions
A scheme of work I’m putting together for students to learn Flash.
The brilliant new programs from Adobe that I’ve been priviledged to beta test.

More very soon – although surely it is rather ironic that I’ve titled this the ‘Publishing tool of the century’ when I’m not even using Flash to publish it? Anyway – Happy Easter!

Do drop by my ContentGenerator.net forum for more details about the programs and the EffectiveICT.co.uk forum

for more general education + ICT discussions. I promise to keep this blog updated more too….

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I’m having enormous hassle printing a dynamic movieClip from Flash. Basically I’m trying to develop my Practice Paper application further (more details later). This tool allows a student to be given a question and they type their answer. When complete, they press a button and are shown a model answer. For the whole thing to be more useful, the student should also be able to press a button and print out their work.

The whole thing works well apart from the printing. OK, actually the whole thing has been a right pig (apologies to pigs) to setup and put together due to immense difficulties getting Flash to process all the rich-text fields. Anyway, that is behind me now. What I’m currently stuck with is how to get the PrintJob class to print more than one page effectively.

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Through literally hours of internet searching and experimenting I’ve found many nearly solutions, but not one that really works. What I hope to do with this post is actually start out not knowing the solution and end up knowing it.

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I’ll update this further later on – although if you are reading this and have any ideas, please let me have them.

BBC article mentioning Flash and JK Rowling

As part of a well written piece about web accessibility I was very pleased to see the BBC identifying something that everyone needs to be made aware of. Far too often so called ‘experts’ say using Flash is a complete waste of time in terms of accessibility, unfairly criticising the technology.

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In the short article the BBC identify how Flash can be used in a really positive way to make things more accessible.

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Ferris Bueller’s Day Off trailer To quote the middle part of the article:

Harry Potter author JK Rowling recently launched the first site to use a new form of Flash, which is often used to add interactivity and animation to a website.

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Two years ago, Adobe updated this technology so designers using Flash could build in accessibility features.

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Leonie Watson says: “Flash is a very interesting topic in terms of web accessibility. It’s actually capable of being very accessible indeed.

“It has means for building in captioning for people who are hearing impaired; it allows soundtracks to be imported very easily so that audio description can be provided for people with visual impairments; it has a lot of very easy ways to build in accessibility, providing the developer sets out to do that from the beginning.”

So, well done the BBC for promoting something that more ‘experts’ should really know so much more about.

Ideas and thoughts about the use of Flash and related tools within education

Adobe Aggregator

EffectiveICT.co.uk

ContentGenerator.net

SchoolHistory.co.uk

History Help forum

Flash CS4 real improvements for educators?

October 5th, 2008 · No Comments

Apple&amp;#039;s famous ad now represents WWDC?

June 10th, 2008 · 1 Comment

Forget Silverlight – is the iPhone the Flash killer?

June 9th, 2008 · 12 Comments

Beta release of Teacher Invaders

May 26th, 2008 · No Comments

Site updated

April 2nd, 2008 · 4 Comments

(UK) Adobe Live

June 10th, 2007 · No Comments

Printing in Flash 8 – the hard way

April 11th, 2007 · No Comments

Publishing tool of the century

April 6th, 2007 · No Comments

Printing via Flash 8

December 30th, 2006 · 12 Comments

BBC praises Flash accessiblity

October 28th, 2006 · No Comments

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