Here the user can save and load their files and it doesn’t mess around. The only thing left to fix is the fact that a user can change the filename and it causes problems when they do this.

The marvellous Flash-DB.com offered me a solution ages ago – I will now experiment with it.
See here

For example, if a school has Flash 7 installed, when the students visit the new version of the storyboard they will be informed that the activity requires Flash 8.

I’ve experimented a little with this Flash detection kit, but thus far haven’t had much success. This is more my fault than anything wrong with the kit though

See here for details:
http://www.macromedia.com/software/flashplayer/download/detection_kit/

As it states there, this script is actually built into the Flash 8 authoring program. However, when I’ve tried to use it, I’ve manually uninstalled my Flash player, visited the storyboards activity and it hasn’t asked me to install the latest player.

Thus I still need to do a little more work with it.

“Need to implement a system that tracks which version of Flash the user has and then helps them install Flash 8. I’ve experimented with the new install system from Macromedia, but it didn’t work for me. Just needs a little more work.”

Where did you get the installer that didn’t work?

It is certainly possible to make the save / load server based, but as you know I’m keen to make sure that students are able to save their work to a .txt file on their own computer or user area.

My problem with making it all server based is that I’ll need to setup accounts for students to use – and I don’t really want to handle thousands of accounts. I’ll also rapidly end up with thousands of small .txt files stored on the site. With the above solution it does use the server to parse the .txt file, but then it is saved visibly so students can see they’ve actually got something.

Depending on how well my current idea goes though I’ll bear your suggestions in mind

Of course I would still like to see this server-based, because you can do so much more with the data once you have centrally stored and managed – but we’ve had this debate before!

Ian

1. Need to implement a system that tracks which version of Flash the user has and then helps them install Flash 8. I’ve experimented with the new install system from Macromedia, but it didn’t work for me. Just needs a little more work.

2. Improve the design of the storyboard – remove these extra pages when the user presses ‘save’ or ‘load’. In the example, these are merely test pages.

3. See if I can improve the Mac support – on my own Mac Mini it works fine, but other Mac users have reported issues. I think this is due to a delay between writing the file to the server and then dialog box appearing – the dialog box appears too quickly it seems.