Digital Workshop

As I found out painfully the preview does not always show how a publication really looks like or really works.

Especially when working on a flex publication some things work fine in preview but not in the exported swf-file.

Please add a real preview or at least the option to start the real output when using the preview function. This can help to avoid a lot of probs and mistakes.

T.

Many years back I developed a major project using Flex. I devoted several hundreds of hours to the project before I proved that the Flex output did not work as I expected.

I accept that my expectations were probably unrealistic, but I learned some important things about Flex -- much like you are learning now.

Someone will probably correct me on this, but I believe that many of the restrictions that you are encountering are related to the underlying properties and restrictions of the .swf files which Opus produces via Flex. Where this is the case, DW can probably do little if anything to remedy the issues you have listed recently. So, please don't be disappointed if DW cannot grant all your wishes.

When I first encountered Flex (it was then an optional add-on that we purchased) I thought it opened up possibilities for my project development. I'm sure there are Opus users who find Flex is perfect for their needs, but in the intervening 6 years, I continue to categorise Flex as something that seemed like a good idea at the time.

Hi Ray,

you are right that one cannot expect that opus behaves like Flash itself but the flash output becomes more and more important because the most major customers don't accept any plugins except flash to run online applications within their intranets any longer.

IMHO the limitations are not in the swf format (you can do almost everything with flash including serious programming) but in the way opus converts the publications to swf.
I don't know exactly how they do that - I heard something about using Qucktime for the conversion.

But look at tools like SwishMax which are also not a part of Macromedia/Adobe and can do almost everything what Flash itself could do.

Especially with regard to new opus users (and to aquire new opus customers) I think it is worth to invest some (more) effort in this area.

T.

The Opus Flash export has nothing to do with QuickTime - it has all been written by my very clever fellow developer in Australia! The only connection to QuickTime is that it is used by native Opus publications to play Flash files embedded as video objects.

And in response to the original request; in order to preview a Flash publication in the Flash player you would have to publish it every time you did a preview. This would be better from the "getting exactly what you see" point of view, but would slow down the preview process.

... that's great. So there are theoretically no or almost no limitations which you can't overcome



... I knew you would say this

My suggestion for this is to give the user the possibility only to preview the current page or the current and the next five pages. This would decrease the exporting time.

T.

When you preview your flash movie in flash - it creates a SWF file... so it would be the same!

Flash is playing back the SWF/Flash natively - that's what it does! Opus has to convert the Opus publication into Flash, create the Flash file and then show it. There is no way round the conversion.