Stand-Alone Limitations and Solutions

When you create a stand-alone, the task may not be as simple as taking your Flash document and exporting it as a projector. In this section, we briefly discuss issues that may affect the performance of your projector.

File Sizes

When you distribute your Flash movies as stand-alones, you may think that you won't have to worry about streaming and download. As a consequence, stand-alones are often made considerably larger than a typical Flash movie — which can be a mistake! Very large movies (5 MB or more) may not play well on slower computers with Pentium II (or PowerMac G3) or older processors. Remember that Flash movies require the computer processor to compute all of those vector calculations, especially for rich animation. When you try to give a slower computer a large Flash movie to load, it may not be able to handle it.

Tip 

One way to get around this limitation is to break your movies into several smaller movies. You can use the loadMovie/unloadMovie actions to open and close other movies within the original movie. You should use these actions in your stand-alones.

You should also test your movies on a variety of computers, especially if you plan to put a lot of development time and money into distributing them on CD-ROM. Some processors handle the movies better than others, and you often have to decide which processor you want to target as the lowest common denominator.

File Locations

If you use the "exec" parameter with an fscommand() action to run an application from the projector, you need to make sure that the application file that Flash is targeting is located within a folder named fscommand. This folder should be contained in the same folder as the stand-alone projector file. In the sample included on this book's CD-ROM, the stand-alone projector named start.exe is allowed to open any application in the fscommand folder.

On the CD-ROM 

You can find a sample projector structure and file setup in the ch23/exec folder of this book's CD-ROM.

Macromedia implemented this security feature with Flash Player 6 stand-alones, and continues to implement the policy with Flash Player 8 stand-alones. By restricting access to executables (that is, application files), users can trust that a Flash movie or projector won't be able to run system-level applications that could potentially corrupt their computer or install a virus.

Caution 

As a Web user, you should always be careful of running any type of application file, especially if you receive it in an e-mail or download it from an unknown company's Web site. A malicious user could easily disguise a virus within any executable. Make sure you run applications only, including projectors, from trusted sources.