Flex Pasta

Were you at Adobe MAX this year?  Jim Corbett presented on “The Searchable SWF File”.  Google and Adobe came together to create Ichabod, a virtual user that can read a flash movie just as a user would and then index the swf just like an html page.   It appears that the searching of SWF files is still in the early stages, but I thought I would give it a try.  I have a SWF file that has embeded html text in an mx:Text tag.  I want to see if Google can find the inner text and have it appear in search results.

Here is the SWF file:  mx.controls.DataGrid

Now let’s check the results at Google

First, all swf files on this site:

Second, all swf files on this site with a keyword of “Column”:

Third, search the web for mx.controls.DataGrid

Let’s see what happens!

If you use Firefox for Flex development, you may have had problems with a SWF caching problem.  Even though a Flex compile updates the SWF file on the file system, Firefox doesn’t pull the new SWF from the server, but rather uses its internal already cached SWF file.  This can cause headaches when trying to guess why the code change doesn’t appear in the browser.  To solution has been to clear the cache in Firefox and reload the page.  I turned my browser cache size limit down to 0MB.  This doesn’t seem to fix the problem either.  There is another setting that can’t be found in the Firefox interface.

1. Open a new tab in Firefox.
2. Type about:config in the url.
3. Agree to the warning.
4. Change the property browser.cache.disk.enable and set it to false.

Thus far this solution seems to keep my SWF file from being cached by Firefox.

How many of you logged on to nbcolympics.com to see the footage?  I know I did, and at first I did cringe at the fact I had to download Silverlight to see the videos!  First I wonder how Silverlight became a partner with NBC.  From Microsofts standpoint it is great exposure to get Silverlight on a lot of computers quickly. Only the videos are using Silverlight, the rest of the site is just HTML.  I would like to make two comments about the site and would like to hear your feedback as well.

1) I would like to have seen NBC do more with the Olympic site.  It is great to be able to search for video by country, athlete, sport, etc, but the interface was poor and sometimes bugy.  Silverlight isn’t advanced as Flex, so I am guessing that is why the searching is done with standard HTML.  Think of the possibilities with Flex on this screen:

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2) The Silverlight video player worked really nice!  I could quickly flip to any part of the video using the player bar and the video continued almost immeadiatly in the new location.  Will Silverlight become a serious competitor to Flex in the coming years?  Will Adobe try and challenge Silverlight on the .NET Framework?  Does Microsoft have an unfair advantage because they own the .NET and can easily integreate and market Silverlight better?  I don’t know the answer to this, but it will be interesting to see how it all plays out!