Dreamweaver Phone Home

I had Fiddler open today when I was trying to get some images from a provider's site for something I'm working on. Well, look who's phoning home to Adobe with my OS, version number, app name, etc... Flash and Dreamweaver!

It even phones this directly into Omniture's website, which is the scary part. If you don't know, Omniture is a web analytics (reporting) tool that the big boys use. The info Omniture can snag is super detailed, from knowing where your mouse's positioning is within a site, the complete trail of where you're coming from and much much more, broken up into beautiful real-time graphs. I know, I've used their tools for sites in the past.

Photoshop and Fireworks don't seem to, except for Fireworks' annoying "Register" window that pops up daily.

JUST IN: It seems both Adobe and Apple use this in their products and it can be a pain to opt-out of. So it's not a new thing, but the fact I never knew about it even though I'm in these products daily means it's not quite as transparent as it should be.

Merging shapes in Illustrator, and the hairline gap intersection

If you have an issue with hairline gaps appearing between two shapes you've merged, or wonder why merged shapes still have two editable shapes grouped, instead of becoming one object, I think you're using the wrong tool. I've been working to get rid of this hairline stroke/gap between two objects I merged. They're letters I've created from other letters. I don't think I've ever really paid attention in Illustrator, I think my main problem is that the Merge "tool" is for paths, not shapes. It will work for shapes, but not quite the way you intend.

Instead of using "Merge" under Pathfinders, use Add to Shape Area under Shape modes, and immediately hit "Expand" in the same palette. This will create one shape out of your objects, instead of just grouping two objects together leaving behind artifacts. This will remedy the white gaps appearing between your two shapes.

Reference:
http://www.bittbox.com/illustrator/pathfinder-explained/

Want to vertically center your dynamic Flash text?

I googled this, and all of the code I came across either didn't work or seemed like a lot of code for such a simple thing. All I wanted to do was vertically center my text against a container I was displaying it in, no matter if I had 1 line, 2 lines, 3, etc.

So I came up with the following code. Just make sure that the object you want to center against is center aligned within the movieClip.

myDynamicText.autoSize = true;
textHeight = myDynamicText._height;
myDynamicText._y = -(textHeight/2);


That's it.