Month: November 2009

Missing Rules and Alerts in Outlook 2003

If you are missing option “Rules and Alerts” in the tools menu of Outlook 2003, make sure that you have a email account created.  I discovered today, that the option isn’t available until you have an email account setup.

Other options that I tried, that didn’t work, but might be useful:

  • Run the “Detect and Repair” for Outlook
  • View->Toolbars->Customize, and then try to add the option back to the menu by looking for “Rules and Alerts” under Commands tab, Tools

So if you don’t have the “Rules and Alerts” option available to you, try one of these suggestions.

Re-center (move) content after resizing stage in Flash

When you have your flash application 90% developed and then a new requirement is presented that requires you to enlarge the stage size, you will find that it puts the additional space on the bottom and right sides of your document.  I haven’t found a way to specify where the additional space is placed, but I was able to find a way to move all my existing content (symbols, tweens, etc) intact together to a new location on the larger stage.

Edit Multiple Frames Screenshot

If you click on the edit multiple frames button (arrow pointing to it in screenshot) below the timeline you will get two brackets above the timeline (in the frame numbers, circled in screenshot), put the [ at frame 1, and the ] at the last frame of your timeline and then do a select-all.  This will select everything in every frame within the brackets.  Then you can drag or use the arrow keys to reposition everything.  When you are finished moving the content, just unclick the edit multiple frames to return to the typical editing mode.

Get parameters to HTML page with JavaScript

If you have a static HTML page that you need to pass a parameter so that it can be updated easily or work in different instances, this post will show you how to get the parameters via the URL into JavaScript without the use of a backend server.

document.URL contains the entire address bar of the browser, and you can parse this to get the parameters and do something useful with it.

Below is the snippet of code I worked up to do this for a mockup/demo that we were working on for work.  Specifically, we wanted to have a single HTML page that would load the same Flex player with different parameters (and wanted to pass those parameters in via the URL) so that we could test with current and future streams/video sources.

<html>
<head>
    <script>
        function pageLoaded() {
            var qAt = document.URL.indexOf("?");
            var params = document.URL.substr(qAt+1);
            // Use params as needed (parse, or pass along to flash swf):
            alert(params);  // just echoing in this example.
        }
    </script>
</head>
<body onload="pageLoaded()">
</body>
</html>