Posted by Onideus Mad Hatter on 12/06/06 08:11

On Wed, 6 Dec 2006 01:46:12 -0600, trippy <silverbells@tacoshells.com>
wrote:

>> Problem is that Flash
>> can't do that (it can pretty much do everything else, just not save
>> stuff unless it's XML...which is rather...dumb).

>Very Cute. I like that.

What gets me is that they claim it's done for security purposes, but
if it's a mostly benign format to begin with like an image or a sound
file I don't see where the harm would be, especially when you can
already let the user save any image, sound, etc that's been preloaded
into its library.

>Dude, I don't see it happening. The only way you're going to get it
>exported as an image file is to do it through the GUI and Mr. End User
>doesn't happen to have that functionality. You can load pretty much
>everything and teh Moon but saving's an apparently much different
>proposition. Without that, you're pretty fucked when it comes to your
>FileReference object's download method. It does make sense, you can't
>even right click on something in flash, much less save it to your
>computer.

....um, actually you're wrong. In Flash you can actually create your
own custom context menus and as long as it's content that's loaded
within the SWFs library, the user can save it:
http://www.blog.lessrain.com/?p=205

The only downside is that content created from scratch cannot be saved
like that...or so they say, it might actually be possible to hack
content loaded within the SWFs library and inject newly created
content directly into it...haven't tried that yet, mostly cause it'd
take too long and may not actually work.

It is very much possible to do though with the use of PHP along with
it, the trick is finding the best means of transferring the data from
the SWF file to the PHP script. Once each pixel color code is sent to
the PHP script it can easily construct a savable graphic.

Probably the easiest method would be to have the Flash file save the
pixel data in the form of an XML file and then have the PHP script
simply work off that...the only downside to that is coming up with a
viable means of session tracking. I was thinking I could use a basic
file name with a date/time stamp on it and maybe use include the users
IP as apart of the file name, then after the XML file is created on
the server it'll launch the PHP script which will then access the
pixel data in the XML file, construct the savable image and then
delete the XML file off the server.

Overall the only reason I don't much like that idea is that it would
be writing and rewriting a lot of data to the servers HDs, which would
equate to needless wear and tear when I can use GET variables...so
long as I find some way of encoding the data so that it's small enough
to fit in the URI.

I saw this the other day:
http://www.flashguru.co.uk/actionscript-3-new-capabilities/

Check out the flash.net.Socket

See that's the thing about Actionscript now, it's like all new
territory, a lot of stuff is certainly possible...but no one has
actually done it yet so there's no basis of comparison, no tutorials,
no examples, you just have to hack through it on yer own until you
find out what you can do with it.

One idea is that using the flash.net.Socket and the ByteArray class I
might be able to encode pixel data directly as say a PNG file and then
attach it to an email that would then be sent to the users email addy
via the flash.net.Socket.

Only downside to that is, as I said, no one has actually done it to my
knowledge so you'd be flyin blind and it'd probably take you twice as
long to figure it out that way as it would one of the other ways I
mentioned.

That flash.net.Socket is REALLY cool, you could create your own Flash
Usenet browser if you wanted.

--

Onideus Mad Hatter
mhm ¹ x ¹
http://www.backwater-productions.net
http://www.backwater-productions.net/hatter-blog


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