Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Flash Skype Status - Part I



The other day, reading my mate Elmer Zinkhann's blog I noticed he has a little Skypes icon showing his status.
I went to the Skype's website and after following a couple of links and adding a bit of my creativity, I ended up with a little flash that shows my status and allows you to start a chat with me if I'm online or leave me a message if not.
What I did is as follows:

Apart from being sure you have the latest SKYPE installed,

- First, allow your status to be shown on the web, following these simple instructions.
- Then select the look the button will have using the skype buttons wizard.
- When getting the code, paste the javascript bit on the html page that has the swf embeded
- The image address is what you will use in flash to show your status.
- Create a very small new movie in flash, mine is 120 x 50 pixels.
- Create a movieclip and give it an instance name, ie "image01".
- In the first frame of your movie add the following actionscript:

image01.loadMovie("http://mystatus.skype.com/smallclassic/yourID");

And that's it!
of course, you will change the image address you got when using the skype buttons wizard.
Upload your swf to your server and embed it into the html page you need to display it.

Bear in mind that if you are behind a proxy, the image will not update properly as flash loads the image from the cache.

Salut!

-- UPDATE --
Part II
Part III
Free Skype Status Flash Button

and the latest one of this series:
Easy Skype status in Flash
---------

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I try to add the Skype Status in a Flash site, as per your instruction, but it works but it REALLY slows down the loading time of the site 'cause it must call every 10 sec to update the skype status.
Can you suggest me some solutions?
Gracias
Saludos

Ernesto said...

Hi anonymous!
well, first of all, this is the first part of "embedding a flash skype status".
I think is better if you load the XML and not the image.png to your flash site.
There is an explanation on this post.

A couple of question:
- why do you need to update the movie every 10 seconds?
- what's the actionscript you are using to update the movie? hopefully is not using "onEnterFrame"

Salut!

Anonymous said...

In the flash the homepage does not loads frequently so if a user remains on my site for a longer time and in between I becomes offline then he should know that.

- This is the reason I am updating my swf every 10 sec.
- I am using setInterval
- A php file on the server reads the xml and status id is returned to the swf. The swf shows a image from the library depending on the status.

Ernesto said...

Hi again!
If I were you, I would use LocalConnection so I know when the main movie has finished loading and as soon as it loads, I would load the Skype Status...
One of these days I will post the basic on how to use the LocalConnection class.

Salut!

Ernesto said...

Done!
I just finished the localConnection basic use on this post

hope it helps!
if anything, I'll be here!

Anonymous said...

The link to the post about LocalConncection doesn't work. Please check it.
Regards

Ernesto said...

:(
what's going on with me? is it the age? stress? tiredness for sure.
Sorry about it, the link is:
this here!

salut

Anonymous said...

Brilliant post. I was wondering about doing this a while back, will definately do it now.

Its so good to see lots of technologies merging together so nicely. You can begin to see the future now with so much integrating.