Very annoying if you ask me because I just want to work like I was used to without fla files growing in size with each new project (for no apparent reason).
Luckily I found a very simple solution: clear everything from your library you don’t need any more and then just hit “Save as…” and save as a CS4 file. Thiss step will remove most of the overhead. After this, saving it again as CS5 file will reduce the file-size even more!

This trick is a bit more work than before (and it would make more sense if Flash did it all by itself),  but atleast it gets the job done.

Hopfully an update for CS5 will get rid of this problem once and for all…

The situation looks like this:


- The two shapes are siblings so they have the same parent (i.o.w. the two shapes can’t be nested).
- The blue oval is on top of the green rectangle.
- I want to know when the mouse leaves the green rectangle.

The problem is that the green rectangle dispatches a ROLL_OUT and MOUSE_OUT event as soon as the mouse hits the blue oval.

I tried all combinations of mouseChildren, buttonMode and enabled on the oval and on the parent of the two clips, but nothing seems to make the oval not “steal focus” of the rectangle.

Here is the source of the test: Rollout test (zip)

I can think of some workarounds (hitArea, using an invisible button, etc.) but I much rather find a straight way to handle this kind of situation.
Since this was never a problem in as2 I believe there should be a decent solution in as3 as well.

If someone has an answer to this problem or knows about a secret property I haven’t tried, please let me know…

It turned out the (old) plugins were the root of the problem and I had to delete them all in order to get my blog up and running again.

Mad as I could be I tried to reinstall new versions of plugins, but since most of the plugins were not yet updated and compatible with the new WordPress version it was still drama and I decided to let it be and leave my blog a big mess (no syntax highlighting, broken tags, etc.).

After a week of snowboard fun I regained the courage to look for new plugins to replace the old ones. And whaddayaknow; I found just the right plugins for my blog. I’m not sure if it was the time plugin-developers needed to update their plugins or the time I needed to cooldown and start a fresh new search but I did it .

SWF and Youtube embedding
To show swf files, youtube videos and other mash-up stuff I now use xhtml-video-embed. This plugin lets you embed different content using a simple [tag] ... [/tag]-markup…
No more fucked-up embedcode in your post editor!

Syntax highlighting
To display my codesnipets in proper format without screwing up the layout of my theme I now use WP-Codebox. It turned out this plugin is even better than my old syntaxhighlighter-plugin!
This plugin uses a <pre lang="LANGUAGE"> ... <pre>-markup and supports a lot of languages (including actionscript). Very nice.

Tagging
For the tags of my post I now use the new tag-feature of WordPress. Since it doesn’t display tags with posts by default I had to find a way to show them anyway and I found the answer right here: http://richgilchrest.com/how-to-add-wordpress-23-tags-to-your-current-theme/
In short; you just have to add a line like the one below into the index.php, archive.php,  and/or single.php file of your theme:
<?php the_tags("<b>Tags:</b> ", ", ", ""); ?>
How easy…

In the end it turned out to be all worth the stress and nail nibbling… justGREAT!

PS: With my blog back in business I decided to change the header and footer of my theme as well. Hope you appreciate it

Apparently it is some weird bug when it comes to multiplying decimals values by 3. Take this little script for example:

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var j:Number; 
for(var i:int=0; i<10; i++){ 
	j = i/10; 
	trace(j+"*3 =\t"+(j*3)); 
}

It outputs:
0*3 = 0
0.1*3 = 0.30000000000000004
0.2*3 = 0.6000000000000001
0.3*3 = 0.8999999999999999
0.4*3 = 1.2000000000000002
0.5*3 = 1.5
0.6*3 = 1.7999999999999998
0.7*3 = 2.0999999999999996
0.8*3 = 2.4000000000000004
0.9*3 = 2.7

And it doesn’t stop just there. The same problems occur when adding a decimal value to the double of it’s value:

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trace(.1+.2) //0.30000000000000004 
trace(.2+.4) //0.6000000000000001 
trace(.3+.6) //0.8999999999999999 
trace(.4+.8) //1.2000000000000002

The problem occurres in Javascript as well as in Actionscript (and probably some other languages too) so it’s probably caused by the way decimal values are treated at byte-level. Because it’s not likely there will be a fix for this soon, here is a little workaround:
i = int(i *10)/10; //use int() in favour of Math.round() to speed up the code

Very smart Adobe!

Fortunately I thought of an easy way to get this problem solved; simply copy the remoting classes from Flash 8 to some other directory and set this directory as one of your default Flash 9 – as2 – classpaths. (Copying it into the default classpath with all other default classes didn’t work for me somehow.)

To make it easy for you I extracted the remoting classes and put them in a zip: as2RemotingPackage.zip

PS: I coudn’t find any info about this on the internet so either nobody ever needed it, nobody ever bothered to try and find a solution or this solution is so simple nobody ever bothered to write about it.
Anyway I bother to write about it for those of you who couldn’t find a solution or just didn’t bother to find one.

Hope this will help you…

As it turned out, the width and height of the MovieClip only represent the bounding box of the original shape (when it still had a rotation of 0). The only way to get the actual width and height of the MovieClip was to use the getBoundsmethod. This method calculates the boundingbox according to the current shape and orientation of the MovieClip giving the trrue width and height.

To test this create a movieclip width a circle in it and place the code below on the first frame (I’m no fan of timeline-code but it’s ideal for testing purpose ).

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this.onEnterFrame = function(){ 
	this._rotation += 15; 
	trace("boundingbox-width: "+(this.getBounds().xMax-this.getBounds().xMin)+"\t\twidth: "+this._width); 
}

The sample is as2 but the problem and solution are the same in as3.

I hope this helps some of you who were wondering why a 25px circel suddenly had a 35.4px width .

To save you the time and frustration, here is why it didn’t work:
You can’t use the allowFullScreen = true and wmode = transparent together

Somehow the flashplayer is not smart enough to simply make the background opaque when you set the player to fullscreen mode.

Lets hope they fix this in the next player update…

After reading Den Ivanov’s post I wanted to make a comment but it became so big I decided to make a post about it myself;

Apart from the bug Den describes there are tons more. I also have troubles with the panels who very often lose their “titlebar” in which case it’s impossible to close them or switch to other tabs in that panel. The only way to restore them is to close and open the panel (hit F4 twice).
There also is a bug in the sizing of the help window as it often resizes to the height of the screen making it impossible to read the complete content.

It’s a shame they release a version that is even more buggy than it’s alpha version. Flash 9 is almost the same as version 8 (apart from the as3 compiler) and yet they manage to screw up the IDE.
Too bad the alpha version of Flash 9 couldn’t handle components because it was much more stable than this buggy crap.

I really hope they fix these bugs (they are definitely not eastereggs like Den said) in the next update…

When I load an image using the Loader class and unload it later on. It won’t be disposed by the garbage collector.
There are no references to neither the Loader nor the (weak) eventlisteners. After loading the image a couple of times the memory goes sky high .

Here is a (simple) example: loadertest.zip

Does anyone have an explaination on why the GC doesn’t clean the loaded content? I would be very grateful!

UPDATE 1 (2007-06-19):
I made the example even less complicated by using the same Loader instance when loading new images.

As I work around I tried to dispose the loaded BitmapData but unfortunately it had no effect.
I assume the leak is somewhere within the Loader (or even deeper in the code) and that the loaded (binary) data is not removed after it’s converted into a BitmapData.

UPDATE 2 (2007-06-19):
I found the solution on in this post:
http://www.webforumz.com/macromedia-flash/42690-memory-leak-when-loading-swf-in.htm

It seems that the unload() method has a bug when used in the flash IDE. Once I ran the test in a browser there seem to be no more problems and the GC nicely clears the memory…

Lets hope Adobe fixes this problem in the next Flash 9 update.