Last week in Gearhead we discussed how we used Business Objects’ Crystal Xcelsius to build a dashboard-style clock application to track elapsed and remaining time for the current mission of the USS Nimitz. Updating the clock in real time was supposed to be impossible, but where there’s a hack, there’s a way.
Just to make sure we’re all up to speed: Crystal Xcelsius is a development system that lets you put a GUI on a spreadsheet and output it as a Macromedia Flash file (Small Web Format), with an optional HTML page to wrap it in (there are a number of other output format choices).
Add a little HTML tweaking for aesthetic reasons and voilà! You have a standard Flash “movie” that you can run in a Web browser. But we wanted more. We wanted to turn the SWF file into a stand-alone executable. This requires what is called a “projector” (Flash content is referred to as “movies,” so continuing with death by metaphor, a projector . . . well, we’re sure you get the idea).
Some time ago we looked at some tools for converting SWFs into EXEs, but most of them were fairly primitive and/or naive. The main problem was most of the tools did a minimal amount of “wrapping up” the Flash content.
Many of them simply slapped a standard Windows application frame with a menu around the movie to provide really basic functions, such as stop or restart. This is like putting fine antique furniture into a mud hut and completely ruins the polish that a product such as Xcelsius offers.
But there is a better way. If you download the Windows version of the USS Nimitz Mission Clock, you’ll notice that the frame we have for the application is not your standard Windows frame. To achieve this we used a product called SWiSH Studio2 from SWiSHzone.com.
SWiSH Studio2 actually does more than create projectors; it also creates screensavers and burns projectors and screensavers directly to CDs and DVDs.
SWiSH Studio2 has a very effective, tabbed user interface. The first tab is where you start by selecting one or more files — which can be Flash movies, images, icons, HTML files or any other files — along with any dependent files that a play list file might need, such as a configuration file or sound sample. You also can set how long each movie plays.
On the next tab, you set all of the runtime attributes. These include the title-bar caption, the icon the projector should use, whether the projector window is resizable and which specific size controls should be available, and whether the projector will be seen in the task bar and the system tray.
The coolest attribute you can set is the projector’s “skin,” which is what the frame surrounding the projector window will look like. But wait, there’s more! You can also create your own skins! They even can be nonrectangular.
And if that isn’t enough, you can forget about skins altogether and just clip the movie to such shapes as a circle, a rectangle, or a rounded rectangle, or to the shape of a bit map. This lets you create non-Windows-style user interfaces easily.
The final tab lets you select the output format (projector, screen saver or burn to disk) and test your creation.
SWiSH Studio2 is a really sophisticated tool, with loads more technical features that we don’t have enough space to cover, such as support for fscommands and a gateway from Flash to the PC Scripting environment, so you can get system data or run external applications.
SWiSH Studio2 is incredibly useful if you are looking to create desktop applications and non-Web-based dashboards from Flash content, such as that generated by Crystal Xcelsius. Given that Xcelsius can produce phenomenal user interfaces for data presentation and manipulation faster and more easily than any other tool we know of (especially compared with directly programming Flash, which has driven strong men to drink), the combination of Xcelsius and SWiSH Studio2 is incredibly powerful.
And at only $49.95, SWiSH Studio 2 qualifies as a steal.
