Bluefire Blog

Did you know that you can modify the menus and menu items in the Flash galleries generated by Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Bridge CS3? Well, you can, and soon you can do even cooler things with those menus. You can add whole new menus that change styles on the fly (changing things like colors and layouts), menus that load a whole different set of images into the gallery, or menus with links to other html pages. You can even create menu items that do multiple things at once (e.g. load a new set of images AND change the style). To see what I’m talking about, check out this sample gallery.

(more…)

Today Adobe Systems announced the release of Adobe® Digital Editions 1.0, a new desktop application for “acquiring, managing and reading eBooks, digital newspapers, and other digital publications”. There’s so much that is cool about this app that it is hard to know where to start. But before diving into that, I should mention that Bluefire provided experience design and Flex development services to Adobe for the 1.0 version effort, so I’m not exactly “impartial”.

A good top level overview of the app can be found in Adobe’s press release, so I won’t regurgitate that in detail, rather I’ll give you a couple excerpted highlights of it, and then dive into my own personal (slightly more geeky) perspective.

(more…)

Many of you have been asking question about our recent posts concerning embedding the Adobe Media Flash Gallery in web pages. And there is some understandable confusion surrounding just how to accomplish this.

The reason for this confusion is twofold: first, the html that we wrote for the gallery was (necessarily) complicated and therefore hard to understand; second, the tips we wrote about html embedding were meant to demonstrate the default file pathing that is hard-coded into the gallery.

Unfortunately this led many of you to get the infamous ‘swirling circle of endless loading’. BUT, there is a better way to point the gallery at the right resources.

read on…

We’ve had several requests for an easier way to add background music to the Flash galleries without having to know how to author Flash. This could have been done in such a way that an “add music” option appeared in the application UI’s, but that would take more time than I have at the moment (as I’d need to do three variations on that for the different app’s gallerymaker implementations). So I’ve put together a quick and dirty solution (albeit requires you to edit the XML -but that is easy!).

Basically it is a flash movie (bgmusic.swf) that you can insert into your exported gallery as a “background image” (though there is nothing “visible” in this movie) and which plays any mp3 file that you want.

Here’s how to do that in four easy steps:
1. right click on this link and choose “save link as” to save the bgmusic.swf to your hard drive in the “resources” folder of your Lightroom Flash gallery.

2. open the “style.xml” file found inside the “styles” folder there in that same resources folder with your favorite text editor

3. find the line of text that looks like this: <backgroundbgimg alpha=”100.00″ src=”"/> - about 2/3 of the way down (line 73 in the Lightroom version) and add the path to the bgmusic.swf into that tag. It should then look like this: <backgroundbgimg alpha=”0.00″ src=”resources\bgmusic.swf”/>
(Elements 5 users should be aware that the relative paths in their galleries are “hard coded” (via the baseref flashvar) to look in the “resources” folder, so it will not work if you include that folder name in the path. So your tweak to the style file would look like this: <backgroundBgImg alpha=”0″ src=”bgmusic.swf” /> )

4. take your background music clip (must be in mp3 format) and copy it into the resources folder as well, and rename it “bgmusic.mp3″

that’s it! Here’s a sample gallery that uses this approach.

Sound that automatically plays in websites is appropriate in some circumstances, and terribly annoying in others. This can be particularly true when you don’t offer volume controls or a mute button (which this movie does not have). So please be thoughtful about where and when to use this. When I have more time, I’ll make one with at least a mute button and post it.

Have fun!

If you’ve been following this blog, you know that Bluefire designed and developed the AMG Flash Gallery found in the web gallery export features of Lightroom 1.0 and Elements 5.0. Well, now it is in Bridge CS3 too! To be more precise, A beta version of the AMG engine (which adds AMG based HTML or Flash gallery export featuers to Bridge CS3) is available for download on Adobe Labs. This is good news for Flash developers, because you can make your own gallery templates and distribute them to users of Bridge, Elements or Lightroom (or all three). Keep in mind that the AMG system allows the gallery template to be ‘paired” with an XML file that causes customization controls to appear in the “host” application. So not only can you as a Flash developer create a gallery template, you can provide your end users with UI controls to customize the template in a wide variety of ways (colors, fonts, layout options, etc). For more info, check out this post on John Nack’s blog.

For more developer oriented info on AMG, read some of the prior articles on this blog, or check out this Adobe Devnet article. and Jeff Tranberry is posting some helpful info as well.