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Is it possible to embed my Google Calendar in flash file?
I would like to avoid having to pop open another window when someone wants to see my schedule.
I know that you can only insert limited HTML tags in flash. But I was able to embed youtube videos
into a dynamic text field, and was hoping I could do the same with the calendar. But so far, no luck.
Any ideas?
Thanks!
Chad
ps...I have KM 7.0.0 and Flash CS3. But I like KM better and would like to do this using the KM program.
Long answer:
It is not possible to embed your Google Calendar INSIDE your flash movie delivered via the web. A youtube video is something entirely different from a GC. You can fool the eye and make it seem so with trickery (hybrid html/swf and DIV layers) but it is not embedded IN your movie and would not be part of your SWF.
I say delivered via the web because you can in fact do this if you author for the desktop using a wrapper like SWF Studio (300 bucks) or Adobe AIR (FREE SDK....the best wrapper of all in this respect IMO due to it's dedicated html engine). At this time though Koolmoves is supported with SWF Studio (or MDM Zinc...or mProjector or etc) only as AS1 (Flash 8) ...meaning you can use SWF Studios API directly with Koolmoves scripting and only need SWF Studio and your compiled Koolmoves SWF but right now we cannot leverage KM7/AS3 (Flash9+) with SWF Studio as their AS3 API uses an SWC Class package (SWC is not supported by KM7). As for use with Adobe AIR....Koolmoves cannot directly interact with AIR and needs an intermediary like Flex or Flash to communicate with the AIR container.
Short answer:
No
You could however if you are willing to put in the time and effort get your calendar in XML and build your own component to display it in flash. Is it worth the effort you'd have to decide.
How would I get this in XML and when you say component, do you mean I would have to design the look of my calendar?Quote:
Originally Posted by blanius
In other words, I would have to design my calendar, which would then incorporate items in the XML file to show what I was doing on a specific date?
I'm sorry chadmagic1. I must have misunderstood the question.
What Blanius describes is RECREATING a Google based calendar...not EMBEDDING your actual Google calendar. You are already able to read your calendar as XML and use it in a component (for instance Wilberts DateChooser) but this is inbound only. To interact with your actual Google calendar (meaning alter/delete/add dates and events) you need to also deal with the outbound data you've changed or added and create data in a format Google accepts and Google Calendar accepts data two ways....iCalendar and Outlook's Comma Separated Values. I know what I speak of...I made one for a client as part of a larger package.
Can you recreate a facsimile of one?...no...embed one?....no. A somewhat similar version of one?....yes.
I did look at a google API component that allow interaction with the calendar but Didn't get it to work yet. Lost interest after awhile anyway.
I agree. It was a nightmare and the entire time all I thought was SWF Studio or AIR would render all this work useless (allowing me to embed the actual calendar and have no need for any additional backends) if only my target was the desktop. Granted...it was fun playing with Wilberts chooser....but otherwise I'd rather eat glass :)
Ok now I am really confused. (Not hard to do!)
I just want someone to be able to view the calendar not edit it, or change it.
Already apologized once for the confusion :)
Then recreate it for display. Koolmoves can do this.
LOL I would recreate it, but thats a lot more work.
Then everytime I wanted to update my calendar, I
have 2 things to update. The flash file and the actual
calendar.
But this might be my only option.
If built correctly, there would be only one thing to re-edit...the calendar using Google as you always do. Even the dual direction one I built required the user to import the output I created (csv). Mine was a 800 member shared system and the need was specific and had it's reason for being ( a shared main calendar displayed as SWF which needed newly scheduled dates specific to the member to be outputted so the members could then import them into their actual Google calendars). Your Koolmoves movie would need to be built once and would read your Google outputted XML and reflect any changes you've made to it at runtime if for display only.
The only way to have a hands free Google calendar (meaning the Google calendar is used as it is meant to ) in a flash environment is the way I described in my long answer in my first post (using a 3rd party wrapper for the desktop).
As a sidenote you may be wondering why anyone would want to use a wrapper to send anything to an actual html activeX object (as most wrappers do like SWFS and Zinc) or sent to a dedicated html engine (like AIR does) targeted for the desktop. It is so they can:
1. Obfuscate where the live html (php,xml,asp,etc) pages reside (meaning hide) and send any page to them just like a web based browser would handle.
2. Completely control the browser environment allowing them to negate right click source viewing, path tracing and other serious security issues that are exposed in a standard browser. They can completely control access to things like navigation controls and page history (among other cool things). The dedicated html engine in AIR is hugely popular and IMO one of the reasons AIR far outshines the competition in this respect. While Google supports public and private calendars...a shared public calendar exposes it's location in a standard browser....not so in the AIR enviro with it's html engine...I can hide it :)
We've lost all wrapper support on our migration to AS3, something you will be hearing me whine about in the future. Our blessing is also our curse if you author for the desktop (which many users do) AND if you need the advanced capabilities of Flash 9/10. As it stands the only way we can interact with the well known wrappers right now is compiling as AS1 (Flash 8). Go to the SWF Studio page...you will see a discount offered to Koomoves users. I would like to see that partnership continued and until they either offer intrinsic AS3 classes (which they don't for AS3...only SWC) or we support SWC we are always going to lose a large percentage of very well known 3rd party AS3 API integration (Google maps, Yahoo maps...and tons of others deliver their AS3 classes as SWC class libraries) until we somehow resolve this (if ever).