Luckily for OS Flash peeps, SWFMill is almost under new management. If you are a SWFMill user you probably know there hasn't been an update for a really long time. If you are also on the mailing list, then you also probably know that there are quite a few patches flying around that have never been applied consistently, let alone included in an official release.
Good news is Daniel Cassidy has picked up the challenge of being the official maintainer and he's now on the steering wheel. Code has been moved to Launchpad and most of those patches integrated in the trunk. Good work!
Still, it seems that Daniel's push for SWFMill comes a little bit late for some people.
SamHaxe has been announced last week. As per the announcement:
it's a haXe/neko based flash resource assembly tool used for collecting various assets(images, sounds, movie clips, fonts, etc.) into a single SWF file
So, a SWFMill "competitor". Can't blame the authors for giving it a go, although I'd like to know why they are starting from scratch instead of fixing what needs to be fixed in SWFMill and building a GUI on top of it. I did ask on the mailing list, but didn't get an answer. Anyway, having several options is a good thing most of the times.
Regarding the SWF library generation without the Flash IDE I for one can't wait for Adobe to fully support and integrate the XFL format once and for all. A zip file with assets and and xml manifesto to describe the whole thing, no more closed-non-backwards compatible FLA files, thank you very much.
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Last week SWFMill started to have BIG crashes on my Ubuntu box when importing a font, so I tried once again to compile SWFMill from sources myself. This is a self note if I ever need to do this again.
* Install Bazaar because that's what the new repo uses. For those who don't know, Bazaar is Canonical's distributed SCM.
* Check out
trunk.
* In an Ubuntu 9.04 clean installation you would need: automake, libtool, build-essential, libxml2-dev, libxslt1-dev, libfreetype6-dev and libpng12-dev. As usual YMMV, you might need some other libraries, but depends on your system.
* Run ./autogen.sh && ./configure && make && sudo make install. If you still have some libraries missing you will be told when running configure.
* After successfully compiling SWFMill, move it from /usr/local/bin/swfmill to /usr/bin. Try running it now, I was getting this error:
error while loading shared libraries: libswft.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Which I had to Google for and solved following
this tip:
[code lang="bash"]sudo /sbin/ldconfig -v[/code]
All clear now : )