Adrian Parr’s Blog

I have just stumbled across g.wygonik’s blog post about finding which character is currently under the cursor. This is something that I have needed to do on numerous occasions back in the AS1 and AS2 days. Adobe did give us TextSnapshot, but that only worked on static textfields, not dynamic or input ones. Now you can use the getCharIndexAtPoint() method of the TextField class.

This demo is a slightly modified version of g.wygonik’s.

You can download the AS3 source from here.

Adobe LiveDocs documentation

I’ve just discovered two lines of code that can crash Flash CS3 on both Mac and PC.

Save any other work (FLAs) you may have open before proceeding!

1. Create a new Flash File (ActionScript 3.0)
2. Put the following two lines of code on the first frame.
3. Test Movie

Bingo!

You can download the FLA from here.

UPDATE 14/08/09: It doesn’t crash in Flash CS4, instead it gives you the following error message …

ArgumentError: Error #2012: TextSnapshot class cannot be instantiated.
at Untitled_fla::MainTimeline/frame1()

I’ve just been having a play around with some particle effect, inspired by Seb Lee-Delisle, who I saw speak on the subject at Flash on the Beach 2007.

You can download the AS3 source code here.

Ok, following on from yesterday’s post about setting the stage quality in AS3, this is how to set the scaleMode, so that you can control how your flash movie scales when the user resizes the Flash Player window or HTML page (if size in HTML is set to percentages).

In AS1 and AS2 we would have used …

And the four different values you could have given it are the strings “showAll”, “exactFit”, “noBorder” and “noScale”.

In AS3 it has changed slightly to …

And the four different constant values available are SHOW_ALL, EXACT_FIT, NO_BORDER and NO_SCALE.

Notice that stage is now all lowercase, and you should use the constant values instead of the string literals.

If you are doing this from within a class then you will need to import the ‘StageScaleMode’ class that lives in the ‘flash.display’ package.

This is how you set the stage quality using ActionScript 3.0

Old AS1 & AS2 code was …

New AS3 code is …

The setting options are BEST, HIGH, MEDIUM & LOW.

If you are using this inside a class, you will also have to import the ‘StageQuality’ class from within the ‘flash.display’ package…

Just thought I’d put together a list of all the Adobe Flash, Flex and AIR conferences I know of that are going on around the world this year (plus a couple of others that are related, ie. SXSW and MIX). If you know of any other ones that I have missed then let me know and I’ll add it to the list.

January 2008

none

February 2008

TOCA ME
February 23rd, 2008
Munich, German

FITC Amsterdam 2008
February 25th - 26th, 2008
Amsterdam, Netherlands

360|Flex Atlanta
February 25th - 27th, 2008
Atlanta, US

March 2008

MIX08
March 5th-7th, 2008
Las Vegas, US

South by Southwest (SXSW)
March 7th - 11th, 2008
Austin, US

Adobe Developer Week 2008
March 27th - 28th, 2008
Online

April 2008

360|Flex Europe
April 7th - 9th, 2008
Milan, Italy

Scotch on AIR
April 11th, 2008
Dublin, Ireland

NAB Show 2008
April 11th - 17th, 2008
Las Vegas, US

FITC Toronto 2008
April 20th - 22nd, 2008
Toronto, Canada

May 2008

10th flashconference 2008
May 8th, 2008
Stuttgart, Germany

OFFF
May 8th - 10th, 2008
Lisbon, Portugal

WebManiacs 2008
May 19th - 23rd, 2008
Washington DC, US

Flashforum Konferenz 2008
May 21st - 24th, 2008
Cologne, Germany

Multi-Mania
May 23rd, 2008
Kortrijk, Belgium

Web Flash Festival
May 23rd - 25th, 2008
Paris, France

June 2008

Scotch on the Rocks ‘08
June 4th - 6th, 2008
Edinburgh, Scotland

flashbelt
June 10th - 13th, 2008
Minneapolis, US

webDU 2008
June 12th - 13th, 2008
Sydney, Australia

FITC Chicago 2008
June 22nd - 23rd, 2008
Chicago, US

July 2008

none

August 2008

Flashforward 2008
August 20th - 22nd, 2008
San Francisco, US

FlexCamp
August 28th, 2008
London, UK

September 2008

Flash on the Beach 2008
September 28th - October 1st, 2008
Brighton, UK

October 2008

Flash on Tap
October 7th - 9th, 2008
Rescheduled: May 28th - 30th, 2009
Boston, US

Flashpitt 2008
October 10th, 2008
Pittsburgh, US

The Actionscript Conference
October 19th, 2008
Singapore

Singularity 08
October 24th - 26th, 2008
Online

November 2008

Adobe MAX 2008 North America
November 16th - 19th, 2008
San Francisco, US

December 2008

Adobe MAX 2008 Europe
December 1st - 4th, 2008
Milan, Italy

January 2009

Adobe MAX 2008 Japan
January 29th - 30th, 2009
Tokyo, Japan

Don’t forget that the Adobe on AIR Tour is coming to Europe this spring. Starting off in Madrid, Spain on March 31st, and then running through to June 13th in Milan, Italy. Check the website to see if it is coming to a European city near you (it is in London on April 9th at The Brewery).

One other Flash conference that has happened in the past, but it doesn’t look like it is happening any more is Spark Europe.

I use SWFObject regularly to embed my SWFs in the HTML page. But was not sure how to display alternate SWFs depending on the Flash Player version installed on the end user’s machine. However, I have just come across a blog entry by David Stiller that clearly explains how to do it.

http://www.quip.net/blog/2008/flash/using-swfobject-for-more

This is a test post from Goolge Docs.

I have just read about doing this on the Web Worker Daily website.

Let’s see if it works.

UPDATE 29/07/2010: Flash CS4 and CS5 now support this metadata, and will override the stage properties that are set in the IDE.

If you are creating an AS3 only project in Flex then at some point you will want to set the framerate, stage size, and stage colour. This is not obvious to find and can be done in one of two ways.

The first method is by providing this information as compiler arguments in the Flex IDE. Go to Project > Properties > ActionScript Compiler. And in the ‘Additional compiler arguments:’ textfield you could enter the following …

-default-frame-rate 25 -default-background-color #FFFFFF
-default-size 800 600

The second method is by putting this information in to your main AS3 class as metadata. For example …

Make sure you put the SWF Metadata AFTER any import statements.

Here are a couple of other blog entries on the subject …

• Ted Patrick
• Derek Vadneau
• Lessrain
• Mike Morearty