Alessandro at Sephiroth is at it again, coming up with useful tools for Flash designers and developers! He has released a new extension for Firefox that lets you easily switch between Flash Player versions to help you view how your Flash is going to display on older versions. It currently works from the most recent version of Flash Player (9,0,16). Get it here.

This is a simple flash piece that prompts users for their birth date. If they are under the age of 17, a sharedobject (Flash’s cookie object) is written and will not allow them into the page– redirecting them to a URL or page? specified. If they are of age to view the content, they will be taken to the main page. This can be customized further to change the age, pages, styles, etc. To further protect content, you can go as far as adding some sharedobject detection code into your final flash/page just in case someone tries to send that link to friends or try to bookmark it.? This is really meant for flash sites who are monitored by organizations such as COPPA and ESRB. Have fun with it!

Check out the demo or download source? (Flash !

Tip for WinXP users: Sharedobjects are typically found under C:\Documents and Settings\YOURUSERNAME\application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects

This is a dynamic image viewer that can count files in a folder based on a sequence of images (1.jpg, 2.jpg, 3.jpg, etc.). It determines the max number of images in a folder based on the last image it can load. If you want to add a new image, just create it with the next number? in line (i.e. 4.jpg) and it will detect it. There’s quite a bit of different things you can do with this… I’ve added a simple slideshow button as an example. Check out the demo or download source? (Flash !

Some background on this viewer:?

I’ve been wanting an image viewer that doesn’t require a whole lot of work to add new images to, with just using Actionscript.? Our primary options for a dynamic viewer? (at least to my knowledge) are:?

• XML: XML is great, but you need to upload it and the image. Benefit is that you can change the order of images pretty easily.
• LoadVars: Same as XML, two files to update.
• Variables: Same as XML, two files to update.
• PHP/ASP/JSP: Works great - you could get a file list, load it into an array and you’re set. Problem with this is that it is server dependent and doesn’t work on all servers - limited support available. This is my problem.

So, I decided to put something together that will do the trick. The only catch - your files must be in a sequence (1.jpg, 2.jpg, 3.jpg, etc.). And, it takes a bit of time for it to detect how many files are in the folder — I could probably optimize this some more for larger file archives, but it’s fast enough for me for now

- Jacob

For you Actionscript noobs - I put together a few simple image viewers that will loop through a series of images with next/back functionality. The number of images to loop through depend on a value that you can set in the movie. One has a pre-loader in it, the other is much more simple. I’ll be posting a version that reads in XML for those who wish to have a dynamic viewer. This requires Flash 8. Enjoy!

Simple Viewer: [demo]
Simple Viewer + Pre-Loader: [demo]
Download Simple Viewer Source: [FLA]