I came across with this library when several friends of mine, all from the artsy world, wanted to me to help out creating a “stunning” flash version portfolio of their works. And I accepted with the promise “As long as you can draw it, I can (theoretically) make it”. And they came up with a tedious tedious idea, which will last for 5 sec in the movie but require a few hours of coding at least, providing I already know how very well. It’s been a while since I talked with them about it (6 months? This’s just slightly longer than the average delay I have when I try to help friends out……Not too long eh?).

In Google search results Sandy is the first, and the next couple are kind of irrelevant, so I guess the second popular Flash 3D engine is probably at least one magnitude less popular than sandy and this made my choice easier. I clicked on the link directly, rather than opening it in a new tab. It has a good bunch of tutorials, and since I’ve taken some introductory 3D programming course, the code isn’t hard to understand at all. I followed the first tutorial, and successfully drew a cube with it. Nice. I kept looking and saw some great ones, but none has enticed me, except the following one. It blew my mind instantly (This reflects my belief that the best pitch of any software comes with great visual look). It’s time to create some really cool stuff now!

<I could have put the flash here, actually I did, but because it’s linking to the tutorial site I couldn’t turn the music off, which would make it annoying to you>

SWFObject is a lightweight library for simplifying embedding flash in web pages. It was quite confusing to me at first that such a library was of any use since Flash is one of the most standardized program on the web, yet the web is so heterogeneous that even such proprietary programs are suffering from inconsistencies from browser to browser.

It took me sometime to figure out that the library in fact offers only one main feature (maybe there are others that I don’t know). Proving something is is probably harder than proving something is not. I was expecting some more fancy stuff such as calling ActionScript from web pages but there was not a clue of such functionality. Anyhow, now I finally understood its use, and this trivial lab is born.

The old story

I believe before everything messed up, we only needed a simple embed or object tag to add flash. Apparently this has changed and we need experienced people to set it up for us so we don’t need to re-invent the wheel.

How do they do it now?

Add two lines of JavaScript

<script type="text/javascript" src="jslib/swfobject/swfobject.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">swfobject.registerObject("myId", "9.0.0", "expressInstall.swf");</script>

Example

Example: lab006.html