One such feature the was missed but now supported is the vCalendar support in Thunderbird. For some time I’ve had a hard time coordinating with the people in my company since the meetings are always done using the vCalendar. They even though I’m not interested in intending those scheduled events since I don’t reply to them. How could I? I couldn’t easy read the raw vCalendar format and reply to them. Installing Lightning in Thunderbird will enable you to read vCalendar format.  It will a calendar application that is useful in tracking events.

Here are the steps:

1. Download the plug-in from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2313
2. On Thunderbird go to Tools->Add-ons.
3. This will open a new dialog. Click on install.
4. Locate the downloaded xpi file and click open. Make sure you selected the file type to display all types.
5. Restart Thunderbird. You’ll then be able to view vCalendar’s and either opt to attend, not attend, or confirm later.

Reference: http://blog.andrewbeacock.com/2007/07/viewing-outlook-vcalendar-meeting.html

Easy to integrate. All you need is to link the javascript and css files in your html and include the following lines on your Flash ActionScript.

on(release) {
    getURL("javascript:flashLightbox('path/to/imagejpg','Your Caption');");
}

 
You will need to add a wmode parameter when embedding the Flash media so that it won’t display on top of the Lightbox. For some reason though this doesn’t work on Firefox in Ubuntu.

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" 
           data="myMovie.swf" 
           width="400" 
           height="400">
    <param name="movie" value="myMovie.swf" />
 
    <!-- Your MUST add the 'wmode' paramater or your flash will appear
         over top of your lightbox images! -->
 
    <param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
</object>

Flash Light Box Demo

Click the link above to see the demo.

At first glance it seems as if they are asking for something that could take months to develop. However, it’s actually simple enough that could be done by patching one component from another. Done with one cup of coffee.

Flash supports HTML. But don’t get too excited. Flash only supports some basic tags. All you need then is to be able to push data to it. You could do this with several methods. One would be using LoadVars. Another one is the good old FlashVars and lastly through XML.

With this example we’re using LoadVars. Below are the only lines of codes you need to do a simple CMS.

// Simple just declare a text area contains an HTML markup
_root.content.html = true;
 
// Load the content
var contentVars = new LoadVars();
contentVars.onLoad = function(ok) {
  if (ok) {
    _root.content.htmlText = contentVars.flash_content;
  }
};
// load the file (use .php extension to avoid browsers from caching the content)
// no worries cause the content is encoded and no php script
// could be executed with this process
contentVars.load("flash_content.php");
 
// this is just to keep flash from running away
stop();

You might wonder why not just use Flash XML feature instead of LoadVars. Well that could be done also. It’s just what I felt doing at the time. Also since I was using php as my file extension XML might not be the right choice as it exposes some security holes.

Next step is the What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editor (WYSIWYG). There are lots available in the net. For this example I used TinyMCE. You would need to configure or do some hack to make the editor only use the tags supported by Flash. List of supported tags could be found in http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_14808.

Once you get that done next step is to push the content of the editor to Flash. This is where PHP plays its role. Of course you could use other server side scripting in place of it.

The result would be something like this (Flash CMS sample). Go ahead and try it. You may also download the source files to modify and maybe improve it.

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