While I was away on vacation VisitKC launched successfully.

I worked on the homepage Flash and a simple slide show that integrates with our REIgnition CMS on the Locals and Meeting Planners homepages.

Since its on the homepage, I had to take special care in loading the Flash and all of its assets. Each “scene” is loaded individually, but in the end the parallax layers work as they would if everything were static. It was a lot of work, but doesn’t compare to the amount of work the rest of the team put into the site.

I came across this error and am blogging about it so I won’t forget the solution and maybe it will help someone else.

1172: Definition fl.video:VideoEvent could not be found.

In order to access a number of the “fl” packages you need to have a component in your library. In this case I added the FLVPlayback component and all was well. Apparently you can use flash.utils.getDefinitionByName as well.

I only worked on the homepage Flash piece and a small interactive map but I really like the way it all turned out. Props to everyone at BarkleyREI who worked on it.

VisitAnnapolis.org

I ran into an issue this weekend with IE7 not clearing my floats correctly. I had a wrapper with a background applied to it and then a content div with floated elements in it. The background was not repeating all the way down the page, and was ending before the content div. I was using my normal methods of clearing floats and of course the page worked fine in Firefox and Safari on the Mac.

After some searching around looking for why this was happening I discovered an article at Position Is Everything that introduced me to a new clearing method which is far more elegant than the solution I was using previously.

You apply the .clearfix class to any div containing a float and its cleared!


.clearfix:after {
content: “.”;
display: block;
height: 0;
clear: both;
visibility: hidden;
}
.clearfix { display:inline-block; }
/* Hide from IE Mac */
.clearfix {display:block;}
/* End hide from IE Mac */


Roger Johansson also suggests adding the following code to a <=IE6 specific CSS file in order to make sure it works in earlier browsers.


clearfix {height:1px;}


So far my favorite events are Event.ADDEDTOSTAGE and Event.REMOVEDFROMSTAGE, they just makes things that much easier.

For instance, I have a SimpleToolTip class that all you have to do is addChild and removeChild to manage it. When its added to the stage, I initialize everything that I need to turn on, when I remove it I turn everything back off.

Its just nice and clean.

Its true and it seems to work perfectly. This makes my life a little easier until June when Exchange support is added to the iPhone. Now I can sync my work calendar to GCal, suck it down to iCal at home, then sync it on to my iPhone so I can be in the know when not in front of Outlook in the office. I like to wake up and know what is on my agenda for the day.

Thanks Google!

(KANSAS CITY) – Barkley, one of the largest independent agencies in the U.S., has acquired the business assets of Pennsylvania-based interactive agency Ripple Effects Interactive. It has been re-branded as BarkleyREI.

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