sIFR 3: Using SVN and About the Beta
Over the past few days I’ve fixed a number of bugs in the code and added some more Flash 8 related features. Here’s a quick post on how to stay up to date. An updated version of the demo distributed with the Alpha release is available.
You can download the latest nightly. The nightlies are similar to the alpha distribution, but you’ll have to re-export the Flash movie and you need to compare the configurations (both in JavaScript as in ActionScript) for changes.
Finally, a list of to-do items for the beta (excluding documentation and testing):
Use
ExternalInterfacewhen possible, instead offscommandHandle font and window resizing
Add a way to change the font style after the movies have rendered
(Test?) support for pixel fonts.
Background images inside the Flash.
Flash 8 filters.
IE focus bug with slow page loading, read more.
Have fun!
Still not replacing any elements in Firefox on Win, here.
Branstrom | 26 May 2006, 23:19 | link
There’s nothing the release 92. last folder is empty.
dross | 1 June 2006, 20:39 | link
Oh, something went wrong in the export script. Fixed it now, thanks!
Mark Wubben | 1 June 2006, 21:41 | link
Release 94 fails to work even out of the box. Minor problems?
Rio | 8 June 2006, 11:19 | link
Works for me, what problem are you seeing and on what browser and platform?
Mark Wubben | 8 June 2006, 17:11 | link
Hi Mark. Why don’t you put sifr.fla in the nighly ?
Ced | 16 June 2006, 12:09 | link
Nice catch, fixed it now.
Mark Wubben | 16 June 2006, 12:42 | link
First of all: Great work! The v8 features make all the difference.
r100 didn’t work for me, though: In Firefox 1.5.0.4 (WinXP), it renders the texts correctly, but doesn’t replace the HTML elements so that I see the sIFR text first and the HTML text directly below it. Configuration was copied from the example page.
Any hints for me?
Wolfgang Wopperer | 17 June 2006, 18:00 | link
Wolfgang, sounds like missing CSS rules?
Mark Wubben | 17 June 2006, 18:52 | link
Thanks - you were right, of course. Silly me. ;-)
Now the texts are being replaced, but when calling sIFR.activate(), all my h1 headlines are being wiped out: The ones for which I specify a replace rule are replaced, as they should be, by the corresponding Flash text, the ones without a replace rule become invisible.
Any idea about that?
Wolfgang Wopperer | 17 June 2006, 22:12 | link
Most likely the CSS rules are too specific with regards to which
h1to hide.Mark Wubben | 17 June 2006, 22:21 | link
That doesn’t seem to be the case since calling sIFR.activate() is enough to hide alle h1 elements, without any replace rule being specified. When I remove the call from my page, the headlines appear again.
I checked all sIFR-related styles and found no reference to h1 elements, but nevertheless every h1 element on my page vanishes - regardless where it’s placed - as soon as I call sIFR.activate().
A bit confusing…
Wolfgang Wopperer | 17 June 2006, 23:35 | link
And again my fault: I had overlooked one “hasFlash” style that hid the headlines. Sorry for the noise…
Wolfgang Wopperer | 18 June 2006, 11:10 | link
If you try and drag select the text that has the glow / drop shadow effect in firefox 1.5.0.4 you can select it but the selection highlight is white and the text does not show. Copy and Paste work if you context click and select copy and context click and paste but ctrl-c and ctrl-v don’t seem to behave.
abba bryant | 28 June 2006, 20:10 | link
will it be possible in the new version to have variable font sizes within the same headline….
for example uppercase titles having the first letter in the title being bigger than the rest of the headline.
something like: the I being a few font sizes bigger in ‘Introduction’, this would be a big bonus for me.
any ideas how this can be done?
Tim | 7 July 2006, 15:37 | link
Hi Tim, you could wrap the first letter in a
spanand set the font size in FlashCSS, not sure how that would impact the rendering though. It probably won’t scale, either.Mark Wubben | 8 July 2006, 03:45 | link
it seems that you cannot use two sifr elements on 1 horizontal position. each sifr eats 100% width. is it true? am i overseeing something? is there a solution? wait for the beta?
keep up the good work!
Marnix | 12 July 2006, 13:53 | link
They’re block elements. It’s probably possible with some CSS magic… but explain why you want to do it like that? Couldn’t you do the same thing with just one sIFRed element?
Branstrom | 12 July 2006, 16:13 | link
Indeed, use some clever css. But perhaps you have a good reason to use 2 x sIFRed
Term | 20 July 2006, 18:30 | link
I’m having trouble with the fonts that I’m exporting out of Flash 8 Professional. I can get sIFR 3 Alpha up and running using the .swf fonts from the demo, but ANY font I try to create and then use, just doesn’t show up. My headers are hidden, but nothing has replaced them… Any thoughts?
Noah | 22 July 2006, 22:08 | link
Version r106 works in IE 6 but the ones after that don’t work… I assume the next nightly will fix this, hopefully….
anyway, keep up the good work, sIFR is a much needed web developers companion in IMHO.
Tim | 7 August 2006, 10:38 | link
When I try to export the SWF from r120 in Flash 7 format, I get an error message that tells me that in line 2 of FilterMap.as the property “flash” is missing (probably inside the definition of the map variable). Any ideas what goes wrong here?
Wolfgang Wopperer | 12 August 2006, 12:47 | link
You need to edit
Options.asand comment out one line. It should be line 5 I think.Mark Wubben | 12 August 2006, 17:31 | link
Would be very nice to see a bugfix so that it can work in IE 6 again. Until then it is not usable at all in the open.
When I tried the r106 there appear commas in the rendered text where there should be blank spaces. This is of course fixed in later releases but then IE doesn’t work.
I guess it isn’t fair to ask for an alpha to be fully functional though.
Anyway: Thank you so much for developing sIFR! :)
Espen | 13 August 2006, 17:26 | link
I’m sorry but none of these work in IE 6, is there ever going to be one that does?
Chris Robinson | 15 August 2006, 23:51 | link
Hey Chris, right now I’m swamped with work and I’m spending my free time exploring Silicon Valley. When I get back to the Netherlands (end of the month) there’ll be time for sIFR again.
Mark Wubben | 16 August 2006, 00:03 | link
I could check for what IE is sulking over and let you know, and then maybe you could put a compatible nightly?
Branstrom | 17 August 2006, 20:25 | link
Nigthly r121 works again in IE. Thank you Frederik for pushing me to finally fix it.
Mark Wubben | 18 August 2006, 07:42 | link
Actually, it doesn’t work for me in IE but I can’t tell you if it’s particular to my browser install or not…
Adam | 4 September 2006, 19:09 | link
Adam, could you provide some more information, either on the mailing list or in the forum?
Mark Wubben | 4 September 2006, 20:11 | link
How would you set case in SiFR 3? I tried sCase: “upper” (like we’re used to from sIFR 2) yet it doesn’t seem to work.
Any hints would be greatfully heard.
Jean-Luc | 13 September 2006, 13:28 | link
You could implement it yourself, but this should indeed be a sIFR option. I’ll get it back in.
Mark Wubben | 13 September 2006, 22:50 | link
Great work on sIFR 3 here Mark… I like what I’m seeing.
I’ve noticed that the file size of the font SWFs is quite high. Whats the reason for this and do you plan to streamline this down?
JL
Jean-Luc | 15 September 2006, 11:23 | link
The file size in the demo is because the normal, bold and italic glyphs are being loaded. When you export your own fonts you should be a bit more specific to pick the ones you really need.
Mark Wubben | 15 September 2006, 15:36 | link
I’m having some problems with the nightly as well, not sure if this is the place to mention this. I can’t open the sifr.fla file: “unexpected file format”. I’m using Flash MX Pro 2004 (7.2). Do I need to use the newest version?
Jarno | 21 September 2006, 09:21 | link
That’s odd, as far as I know Flash MX Pro 2004 is capable of handling Flash 8, and I don’t have issues with Flash 8 Pro on the Mac.
Mark Wubben | 21 September 2006, 09:35 | link
Well, thanks to your product my (our) live just got easier. I’ll talk to some people here to see if we can do something about that “donate” item on the site.
Jarno | 22 September 2006, 15:24 | link
An updated version of the demo distributed with the Alpha release is available….
um, that doesn’t work in my IE6. Is this a known deal and/or is there a version that DOES work in IE6?
Just fyi, and no harshness intended, but the directions for sIFR (all versions) seems really vague… I can SEE that the approach changes radically from version to version in the demos by simply looking at the javascript, but no where can I find a step by step tutorial that both defines the “names” of each part of sIFR and says where to put each bit.
I would just like to get ONE version of sIFR3x to work in both Firefox and IE6…
questions: 1) can the sifr.js, css and such all be at the same level? 2) is there some issue when an element (to be replaced) is contained in an absolutely place div? (an h1, for example) 3) what are the potential reasons that the actual text doesn’t show up? I can see that there is a flash element there because I can right-click on it and get a flash context menu… but no text. 4) where is the debugger.js file referenced in the r160 build?
thanks… I’d post an example (and may, soon) except that it is a wordpress site and not ready for primetime yet. I may set up a more simple example to show if I can find time.
as someone who is not expert at javascript and flash, it would be nice to read a changelog or something about how the steps for using sIFR3x have changed since the previous versions.
that said, if I ever get it going, I’ll make a donation!
Casey | 30 October 2006, 00:29 | link
I have no problem in IE 6, are you sure you have Flash 8 installed in IE?
Documentation for sIFR 3 is virtually non-existent, partly because what was –rather quickly – written in the past is now outdated. That said, sIFR is still very much a work in progress, and proper documentation will be there for a final release.
To answer your other questions:
1) Sure, as long as the files are loaded correctly into the page it doesn’t matter where they are located. 2) From the way you describe it, it seems the Flash movie can’t be found. Or you’ve accidentally styled the text to be the same color as the background ;-) 3) Oops, this was missing. Please download r160 again and it should be there in the
srcdirectory.Mark Wubben | 30 October 2006, 10:03 | link
I’ve used r160. It correctly works, but if it’s used with a lightbox (or thickbox) like this http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox2/ for example elements appear over the photo. WIth other nightlies (or with the ver 3.0 alpha ) it’s ok.
Bye and compliments
Giordano Dolfi | 31 October 2006, 01:16 | link
Hi Giordano, could you provide some demos with different sIFR revisions at the forum? Thanks!
Mark Wubben | 2 November 2006, 11:22 | link
I tried build #183 on my blog. Works totally great in IE6 and IE7. However, it did absolutely nothing on Fire Fox 1.5.0.8 (the one I currently have).
Dom | 3 December 2006, 22:14 | link
Hi Dom, thanks for the comment. Are you sure Flash is properly installed in Firefox? sIFR 3 requires Flash 8. I just tried it on my Firefox 1.5 install (an optimized 1.5.0.6 for PPC Mac) and it’s fine.
Mark Wubben | 3 December 2006, 23:24 | link
Good news and bad news. The problem was effectively that flash8 was not installed on my firefox.
However, the font sizes are totally messed up with FF.
Dom | 4 December 2006, 07:54 | link
Could you post a demo at the forum?
Mark Wubben | 4 December 2006, 08:59 | link
In fact, I changed a few font sizes in my css file and now it also works correctly in FF, I don’t know why.
Dom | 4 December 2006, 12:33 | link
If this is a known bug then I apologize for the duplication. When using sIFR text in a div above another flash piece (specifically when all flash pieces are using the transparent wmode) the flash piece beneath the sIFR text runs DEATHLY slow.
The graphics in the lower flash piece get extremely pixelated for every piece of sIFR text rendered on the screen.
This bug is in Firefox on the mac only and may in reality be a FF OS X bug.
Just FYI.
Chuck Shipman | 14 November 2007, 18:02 | link
Sounds like a Firefox/Mac issue, yep.
Mark Wubben | 14 November 2007, 19:04 | link