Northcode Inc.

Instant Features - No ActionScript Required

What if you could easily remove the title bar and borders from your projector. change the icon it displays, make your SWF run in the system tray or turn a SWF into a screensaver? Now imagine if you could do all those things, and a LOT more, without writing a single line of ActionScript?

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Tray Icons, Mouse Clicks and Popup Menus

I frequently run into lost souls using our competitors' tools asking how they can control what happens when they click an icon in the system tray. The answer they get is almost universally "you can't control that, Windows handles that for you" but that just isn't even close to true.

So, if Windows doesn't control what happens, how are clicks on the icons supposed to work? There are User Experience Guidelines you can follow, but there are no rules. Ultimately the decision is up to the application that receives the mouse clicks.

I'm going to show you just how much control you have over the behavior of your tray icons using SWF Studio. If you're using one of those other tools, don't worry, your users probably won't notice that weird tray icon behavior...

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Avoiding Windows "Drive Not Ready" Errors

Nothing ruins a professional presentation faster than an unwelcome Windows error message like the infamous "drive not ready" or "no disk in drive". Flash was created for the web so it doesn't provide any protection against these types of errors.

The good news is that if you're using SWF Studio most of these errors are suppressed for you. However, if you want to call an external application that may try to access a floppy or a CD that isn't loaded, then you're going to need a little more help.

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Save Movie Clips as JPEGs

SWF Studio already allows you to save all or part of your application window using ssCore.Win.saveImage but it suffers from one major drawback, you can only save the visible portion of the application window. The technique presented here removes that limitation and allows you to save the contents of any movie clip regardless of whether it's visible or not.

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