April 15th 2005 | Jens C Brynildsen

Review: Screenweaver

Created by veterans in the Flash community, these guys knew what the users wanted. Screenweaver was the first tool to use something resembling Actionscript and event handling, rather than cryptic FSCommands and looping MovieClips.

(RubberDuck, the company behind ScreenWeaver folded and for a while the software was not available. The software is now available as Open Source and is free for all to use. It is worth to note that the stability of the Open Source version is not quite the same as the commercial version, but that will hopefully improve over time.)

Screenweaver was still a great product, so this review is included for comparison purposes.

Screenweaver was developed by the company Rubberduck in the Netherlands. We were able to get hold of lead developer Edwin van Rijkom and according to him, "Rubberduck & Screenweaver can best be characterized as being asleep. Although the software is still available for those who really like it & work with Flash 6, there is no active support or development".

Many people have had opinions on what happened to Rubberduck and Screenweaver. On the Flashcoders list, there has even been a rumor that Edwin went to work for Macromedia. Edwin confirms that this is nothing but a rumor as he is now focusing fulltime on his IT studies. "Things simply didn't work out as planned. There's no short explanation, I'm afraid", says Edwin.

Screenweaver was a really promising product, but there will probably never be a new version. The forums are taken offline and the SWCoders mailing list went silent this summer. Shortly after we talked to him, Edwin officially closed screenweaver.com and posted a note saying "Support on the Screenweaver (3/MX) product has been discontinued. It is no longer available for download or for sale."

Documentation
All the commands in ScreenWeaver were fully documented, with both online help and help files that plug straight into Flash's reference panel. All commands had examples of usage.

Ease of use
ScreenWeaver came with a set of Flash components that simplified several things. The components were well coded and they were rather designer friendly in the way that they required little or no coding to do their job. To make a screensaver, you'd just drop a screensaver component into your Flash file. Once your SWF is ready, you open it in the ScreenWeaver program, set features such as expiration date for the projector, start position, right click options, keyboard keys to block, window appearance, etc and export to an executable. To debug your application, the ScreenWeaver program has a separate debugger called ScreenWeaver Monitor that displays special trace-commands.

The exported file can be either a standalone program, a program with installer, a custom installer or a screensaver. You can choose to include the Flash player or rely on whatever the user has installed on their machine.

Platform Support (PC)
ScreenWeaver supported only Windows projectors. We've had some stability problems on Win98 and WinME using ScreenWeaver, so extensive testing is recommended before distributing applications in large numbers.

Extensibility (DLL)
ScreenWeaver had the ability to call DLLs directly. Documentation was a bit sketchy on this point, so it was hard to implement. Rubberduck also provided three DLLs that extended ScreenWeaver: Joystick input, Screen Capture and Wave volume for sound control.

File Opening Example:
Screenweaver used the Windows dialogues, so to open a file, you'd call the open the BrowseForFile-dialogue, and this would return the path to the file chosen. This was then used to open the file and read the contents.

import mx.controls.TextArea;

import mx.controls.Button;

// Initialize the ScreenWeaver interface

swInterface.init();

// Setup text field for displaying the text

var tArea:TextArea = _root.createClassObject(mx.controls.TextArea, "my_tf", 999,{html:true,border:true,_y:40});


tArea.setSize(300, 160);

// Make a Browse-button

var tButt:Button = _root.createClassObject(mx.controls.Button, "my_tb", 998,{label:"Browse",_x:10,_y:10});

tButt.clickHandler = function(){

 swOpen();

}

// Opening a Dialogue to browse for files

function swOpen()


{

 swSystem.Dialogs.BrowseForFile_Open( "data.txt", ["ActionScript Map Files (*.as)", "*.as"],  "C:", "Browse for file", this.swOpen_Return, this );

}

// What to do once we know the name of the file

function swOpen_Return ( success, file )

{

  if (success)

  {


  swDebug.trace("User selected: "+file );

  swFile.loadString( file, this.swLoad, this );

  }

  else

  {

   return false;


  }

}

// Load the file itself and process the data

function swLoad (success, data )

{

 if(success)

 {


  var cont:String = _global.mFile.readString(file);

  tArea.text = "Contents:"+cont;

 }

}

Full Application Example - MXI Creator
MXI Creator is a must-have tool for all Flash component developers. This brilliant tool, made by Flash coder/designer Muzak will aid you in creating the MXI install files used to distribute and install Flash components (and other elements) in the Flash IDE.

Muzak also has other cool stuff for Flash users, so visit his personal site too and check the downloads-section.
Click here to visit Muzak and download MXI Creator