At the conference I mentioned in a previous post, Brent Simmons mentions that you have to be thick-skinned to enter this business. Soon after your release, everyone start rating and judging your software.

I started googling for screen mimic comments yesterday and found some that were favorable, and some that were well, less than favorable.

One of the most common unfavorable comments was this:

“The movie size vs quality slider doesn’t seem to do anything. This software <insert critical verb here>”

I have addressed this on the Polarian FAQ page (question 4), in short let me say that this slider adjusts the keyframe frequency of the encoding process. Those of you who understand how keyframes work will understand the conditions under which this may or may not help with file size. Those of you that don’t understand how this works, I tried to explain it in the FAQ page.

Another discussion that happened on A swedish Mac site is regarding loading the SWF files into Flash.

–funkar inte att importera .swf filen i flash 8 ..

inte ens dynamiskt?

–vad menar du?

Men om man vill ha det som filmer d�? Kan man inte f� det, eller finns det n�got annat program som fixar det? Har letat som fan efter ett s�nt n�mligen.

You can see where this is leading. I believe they are discussing the fact that Flash doesn’t support importing SWF movies into the Flash authoring program that have been encoded in ScreenVideo format. I am looking into this to determine exactly why that is, however in the meantime someone then asked if you can load the file in dynamically (at least I think that is what they asked), and the answer is Yes, you can load the movie through the Action Script command “loadMovie()”.

So you can setup a preloader to load your demo movie via Action Script (which is how most preloaders work). For more information on using preloaders, see this article from O’Reilly (particularly the section on Multiple-Movie Preloaders.)