MochiBot Blog

We’re back from a busy (and fun) week in Anaheim at the Macromedia MAX conference. We managed to squeeze in some work this past week so here’s a list of the changes you’ll be seeing on the site:

• Top Hosts Report - This new report will show you a history of how your SWFs have spread to their most active hosts.
• Formatted numbers - This may not seem like a big deal, but we’re happy to have it in the site now.
• Total Hosts - The SWF Detail page now shows the total number of hosts your SWF has spread across.
• Cosmetic changes - We’re always working to clean up the interface so this is pretty much becoming a standard item in each build.

The adoption of the Flash 8 player has been picking up steam and one of the biggest effects on Flash developers has been related to the Flash 8 player security model. The issue we’ve seen most often has been the warning message that is presented to users when playing a SWF locally with MochiBot in it. In order to address this issue we’ve released a new version of the MochiBot code along with some improvements to the core SWF. The new MochiBot code will prevent MochiBot from tracking local views when the networking privelege is not enabled. If you want to enable networking priveleges in your Flash content you must either publish with Flash 8 or use the Local Content Updater that Macromedia provides.

Now on to the new and improved features that you’ll see:

• MochiBot Code version 5 - The new MochiBot code has been improved for better Flash 8 compatibility and performance. All of the SWFs with prior versions of the MochiBot code will still continue to work as usual.
• Multiple MochiBots in one SWF - You can now use multiple MochiBots in one SWF to track different events or different SWFs being loaded into a container.
• Total views - The SWF Detail page now shows you the total number of views your SWF has received.
• Animated MochiBot logo - We added a download of the animated MochiBot logo to the Create MochiBot and MochiBot Code pages.
• New graph legend - We got rid of the graph legend on the Dashboard and replaced it with color coded SWF names when you select a SWF to be displayed in the graph

As always let us know what you think about MochiBot. What do you love about it? What do you hate about it? What features would you like to see in our upcoming builds? What would you change about MochiBot?

The MochiBot team is taking a little roadtrip down to LA tomorrow for some pre-conference fun with Flash. Then on Sunday we’re heading down to Anaheim for the real deal. There’s a ton of stuff going on the next few days and our schedules are packed to the brim. I’ll either have a lot to write about or write nothing at all because of the lack of time.

If any of you are going to the MAX conference or will be in the area and want to meet up then just leave us a message here.

If you’ve ever done any game development then you know how hard it is to accomplish true shape based hit detection. Fortunately, Grant Skinner has just published a class that allows for simple shape based hit detection in Flash 8.

http://www.gskinner.com/blog/…

If you’ve got a great game to show off then feel free to post a link here.

Here’s a link to some great Flash 8 examples that also include a download for each example.

http://www.senocular.com/pub/flash/8/index.php

There are a lot of great features in Flash 8 (aside from the Flash 8 Player security model) that will really push media content to a new level in the months to come.