Making a note of this here because I don’t see it in any of the docs.

When using ExternalInterface cross-domain (i.e. the swf and JS are on different domains) you may get an ‘Unspecified error’ message in IE. Debugging in Visual Studio gives an ‘unknown exception’ in the return statement of this function:

function __flash__addCallback(instance, name) {
instance[name] = function () {
return eval(instance.CallFunction("" + __flash__argumentsToXML(arguments,0) + ""));
}
}

The fix is to add

System.security.allowDomain("*");

in your AS code. ExternalInterface requires the allowDomain to be set when HTML-SWF cross-scripting is performed even though it’s local to your browser. Thanks to my co-worker Sean Neville for this information.

(Note that you will also need to set allowScriptAccess="always" in the swf embed tags to allow cross-scripting)

Another update to PostcardViewer. Jeffrey Tranberry from Adobe has provided this excellent script to create a PostcardViewer gallery directly from Photoshop. Instructions are here. Nice one Jeff!

It feels very good to finally get this one off my chest! I’ve been meaning to build a nice Flash interface for image search for a long time now. I tried it in Flash 7, but it turns out that most of the images on the web are progressive-JPGs. Since Flash 8 can handle progressive JPGs, if figured I had to git ‘er done. Check out the app here.

The search results are courtesy of Yahoo’s fantastic Image Search API. Originally I had tried to connect to Google’s image search by using screen-scraping, but it turned out to be much easier to hook up to the Yahoo API, which returns nicely formatted XML.

The interface is designed to be a simple as possible, while retaining some powerful features. Hopefully this is something that is genuinely useful and will “empower image searchers across the world” (cue dramatic music). Check out a more in-depth description of Simple Image Search here. Please let me know if you have comments, suggestions or bugs.