The following step assume that you’re at the Publish movie screen and that you’ve clicked the YouTube download option. For detailed steps on how to get to this option, please refer the KB article

http://apps.toufee.com/support/index.php?page=kb_view&id=130

1) When you click the YouTube download option, you’ll receive a video download link to your email. Once you receive the download link, you’ll have to append the .avi extension as follows:

For example, if your download link is

http://apps.toufee.com/flashmovies/3055/ToufeeFlash.html

The remove .html extension at the end and replace it with .avi as follows

http://apps.toufee.com/flashmovies/3055/ToufeeFlash.avi

If you need to download the video in MOV, or MP4 formats, then replace with .mov and .mp4 respectively.

I hope this feature is useful. As I’ve been mentioning in the previous posts, we are working on new features for Toufee and you can expect the updates in the blog.

Gladly, there is a workaround that you could use for now. Since Toufee supports converting flash movies to video files, the answer is to use YouTube as a content delivery medium for your flash movies. YouTube provides an Andriod application that lets you watch the videos. So get the ball rolling and start updating your YouTube channel with your flash movies. A great fit would be the delivery of video-series such as educational tutorials, marketing promo series, etc. So the next time someone asks you how to check your flash movie on their mobile, send them to your YouTube channel!

To access Movie Presets, click the Presets button on the left panel. Then click the Movie Presets option

The Movie Presets will expand to reveal the two options – Slideshow and Simple Fading. Click the Simple Fading button

You’ll see a dialog box that asks if you wish to apply the Simple Fade. Click Yes

All the flash movie items’s In Effect and Out Effect settings should now be reset to Simple Fade.

I hope you find this setting useful. We do admit that there is a lot of work to be done on Movie Preset. We could allow saving a lot more options as Preset at a global level which you may apply on every other flash movie.

That’s it for now, have a good weekend and Happy Easter to all our customers.

Setting a Common Background Color

Setting a Common Background Image

Just to clarify a basic question, the default background that is set for a Flash Builder flash movie is a transparent background. It means that the flash movie takes the background of its container, i.e. say you embed the flash movie in your webpage that has a red background, the flash movie takes the red color. If you place the flash movie over a webpage that has a gradient or textured background, then the same background comes through due to the background transparency.

Setting a Gradient background

What’s less obvious is how to set a gradient color for the background. To be able to do this, one has to have a solid color background set. With a backround color set, click the Background label in the Timing bar. This will reveal the Background Properties section in the left panel

Click the Change button to open the Edit Gradient window. You should now be able to set the two colors for the Gradient effect.

A quick tip to achieve sleek gradient effects is to avoid colors that have sparking color contrasts, i.e. don’t go for colors that are two opposite sides of the spectrum, instead choose the second color that is close but distinguishable from first color – this will result in professional looking gradients.

This way, you won’t have to wait for the email to get the download link. As soon as your video is processed, the download link will be available from the dropout menu. The usual wait time for the download link is 8-10 minutes. The next time you see a delay with getting the download link, go ahead and re-submit the download request, and check the dropout menu in the Members Area after 8 minutes.

I hope you people find this option. Should you have any questions please feel free to share your comments via the Support Desk.

So where can one enter the hex code? If you look at the color palette, you’ll see the hex code displayed for the chosen color. The rectangular area is actually a text box that you can type into. This means you can enter your own hex code and the color palette will take it.

Block and Type, finally press Enter

You’ll notice that the text that you type in may not be visible. This is because the textbox and the font color are both white. You’ll have to block the region (i.e. select the code displayed) and then type in your hex code. Remember to press Enter key after you enter the color code. Simply entering the code won’t set it to the desired color.

I hope this tip helps when working with your flash movies. Thanks to Charlotte for bringing this up.

Why need Layers?

Let’s take a simple example where you want to display a text item directly over an image in your flash movie. If you added the text item first and then the image, then in the normal case, the image would be placed directly over the image causing the text to be not viewable. To overcome the problem, you’d have to add the image first and then add the text item to your flash movie. This approach however may not be feasible when you have to work with a number of text or image items. This is where Layers are useful. With the Layers concept, you may re-arrange the layer order/stack order of the items such that one is shown over the other or vice-versa.

Where is the Layers Option in Flash Builder?

If you open the flash movie and go to the Timeline bar at the bottom you will notice that the images and text item labels will be listed. This is actually the ordering of the layers of the flash movie. To clarify, each item (text, button, image or video) that you place in your flash movie is created in its own layer. In the Timing bar where you see all the items listed vertically, you will notice a big horizontal bar over which you will find each item label (such as “Text1″ or “Image4″, or “Button1″).

This horizontal bar represents the layer, one for each item. To move the item’s layer, simply click on the empty area in the big horizontal bar of each item. Do not click over the item label or inside the item label area as this select the item…one has to click outside of the Item label text. Once you click it, the layer will be selected and you could then move the item layer up or down by drag it to move up or move down. So when you have images that take up the entire flash movie area and you wish to have text items show over or on the image, then you move the Text Items higher up the order in the Timeline and move down the image items below the text items.

Buttons as Text Items

What some customers have requested is the ability to add hyperlinks to regular text items. If you look at the current text item option available in the Flash Builder, there isn’t a direct option to hyperlinks text items.

The way around the issue is to use the NoSkin skin-type for the button. This turns the flash button into a regular text item. This virtually creates a text item with the hyperlink features of a button. While internally this item is treated as a button, you may use the regular editor options to change the font, text style, etc on the “NoSkin” -type button.

Note that the instructions/screenshots provided above applies only to the Flash Builder. In the next article, we’ll discuss how to create hyperlinks for flash movies created using the Flash Apps like Flash Slideshow Maker, Flash Accordion Maker, etc.

Watch out for the filename

When saving your flash movie project, make sure you don’t use an existing project name to save a new project. Toufee simply overwrites any existing project file that exists by the same name without any warning.  This applies to Flash Builder-type projects as well as any of the other Flash Apps. This does look awkward and we’re fully aware of this glitch. The technical team is working on putting a warning note very soon.

Popup Blocker message keeps popping up

If you happen to use hyperlinks in your flash movie, then you may noticed that every time that you click on the link, Toufee opens a popup blocker warning window. This happens even if you had turned off the popup blocker setting for your browser. Weird? Well Toufee actually displays this warning regardless of your popup blocker setting, i.e. Toufee displays the warning all times. However, many customers have reported that it doesn’t look any good on their flash movies. We’re coming up with a fix to this very soon.

Clicked the SWF or YouTube download option but no effect

When using the SWF download option, you may have noticed that clicking the SWF icon in the Publish Project window results in nothing happening…you don’t seem to get the SWF download prompt. The same may hold true when using the YouTube download option…absolutely nothing. The gotcha here is that Toufee happens to open a new browser window (that initiates the SWF file download or YouTube video queued message) and this new window gets opened in the background, i.e. you may notice this visually when you have multiple browser tabs or windows opens. So the next time this happens, please do check all open browser windows for the SWF download prompt or the Video Queued message.

No option to delete Image, Audio or Video?

This might be a bomber. The reason that this option was turned off is due to the fact that when you add an image or an audio to your flash movie, Toufee only maintains a reference to the uploaded content and does not embed the image or audio unless to export the flash movie as a SWF file. When we did have the option to delete the uploaded content, users started to delete images that were still in use with other projects and some users deleted the image after adding it to a project thinking it would be saved along with the project file. This resulted in many customer movies going and we had to temporarily turn off the delete option to avoid data loss.

Removing the Fade In effect

To remove the Fade In effect, simply drag the slider for the Fade In such that it is zero. Earlier, we did have an option where one could directly adjust the slanted triangle-like marker (that denotes the effect duration) in the Timing section to modify the flash effect duration. However, this was retired as it was sometimes difficult to work with when the flash effect duration was particularly small (such as a 1 second effect).

You would notice that once the Fade In effect is removed  there wouldn’t be the this slanted triangle before the Video label in the Timing bar. This is a visual indication that the Fade In effect does not exist on the item.

The same steps apply to removing the Fade In or the Fade Out flash effect on any item such as text or images. Remember that the Fade In effect property only controls the timing of the “Fade In”. The actual effect, or the effect type is determined by the In Effect dropdown list under the General Properties section. The In Effect property is used to select the effect that would be applied as Fade In.