Flash Turns Me Into a Retard

Every time I use Adobe Flash, I end up feeling like a “very special” computer user, except one that is also drunk and wearing mittens. I can honestly have called myself a computer programmer of some sort since I was 7 (though I don’t list Apple Basic on my resume these days) and I’ve gotten to be a fairly competent Photoshop user, yet something about Flash is not clicking for me.

Tonight, I needed to update the banner that is on the home page at WMSE.org for an upcoming promotion they are having. It should have been pretty simple. There is a main SWF file that does the banner rotation, and I’ve edited that before, groping my way through ActionScript. It basically loads several other SWF’s to display as sort of a slideshow, but tonight I had to create a whole new SWF for it to display- nothing fancy, no animation, no video, and someone already did the artwork. Yet for the life of me it took almost an hour to figure out how to make it a clickable image. In the end, after much Googling I figured out how turn the image into an object, make it a button and set the action to getURL.

Oh yeah, WMSE has indeed updated it’s web site. I was a little premature back in December, but it’s been live now for a few weeks.  They will be promoting it on the air soon. There are still a few bugs that crop up from time to time (like random users can’t access the archives - if you’re one of them know I’m still trying to get to the bottom of it), but for the most part it is pretty solid, and is only going to get better from here.