Ming vs Flash

Flash, oooohhhhh! Saviour of the universe!

No, not the evil warlord and his arch enemy, but the ming library for PHP and other languages.
Take a quick look through the examples. Interesting eh?
Of course, I want to do something that Ming itself might not be able to do: create a static .swf file that can load image files given on the URL command line. I’ve gone searching and I’m grappling with new ideas. It seems I’ll have to write actionscript to load the image (that’s obvious if you think about it, Ming is out of the way when a .swf file is created.)
None of the examples I’ve come across accept parameters. 🙁
I’m going to look at this over the weekend if I find the time.

Some links:

  • Google Search: flash tutorial
  • w3schools
  • Macromedia
  • Flash and Javascriptvery interesting.
  • The bitmaps example on the Ming examples page offers a clue.

    // add a third bitmap of xmms using MX actionscript
    $strAction = ”
    createEmptyMovieClip(‘picxmms’,10);
    picxmms._x=150;
    picxmms._y=100;
    picxmms.loadMovie(‘http://www16.brinkster.com/gazb/ming/xmms.jpg’);
    “;
    $movie->add(new SWFAction(str_replace(“\r”, “”, $strAction)));

    If I could replace the movie URL with a variable I’d be sorted!

Later.. I should have asked Google first. Here’s how to pass parameters to a Flash file. The variable name gets put into the _root name space automatically.

GIMPshop – A gimp in photoshop's clothing

Here’s GIMPshop, a version of the GIMP that looks like Photoshop. It’s a 40MB download for the Mac OS X version.
I’d hate to have to maintain this beast…

What made this project especially difficult is that there isn’t one file that holds all of Gimp’s tool names and menu structure. I’ve modified hundreds of files and combed thousands of lines of code to make this version of Gimp a reality.

There’s an RPM binary here for Linux users. To be honest I could never find my way around the Photoshop interface as I’m so used to the GIMP one, but whatever brings people into the fold…