If you are using the Flash Debugger Player like I do to debug your work , you will soon to realized that the newer versions of Firefox tends to crash whenever the debugger prompts a warning. This is happening because Firefox will kill the debug session and cause it to crash Firefox. Here’s a solution to it

1. Goto addresss bar and type in about:config
2. Click on the I’ll be careful, I promise button.
3. Type dom.ipc.plugins.timeoutSecs
4. Find value and double click and change the value to -1

Viola and now your flash debugger player will stop crashing each time it throws a warning as you have changed the default timeout value from 45 to unlimited.

Here’s a quick solution to the error ReferenceError: Error #1069: Property startDrag not found on flash.text.TextField . This normally happens when you are trying to get the TextField to drag.

 
textField.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, drag);
textField.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_UP, drop);
 
// by setting mouseChildren = false it makes the drag function to use the container 
// of the movie clip rather than the compenent within the movieclip. 
// This is where the ReferenceError: Error #1069: Property startDrag 
// not found on flash.text.TextField is coming from 
 
textField.mouseChildren = false;
textField.text1.selectable = false;
 
function drag(e:MouseEvent):void {
	e.target.startDrag();
}
 
 
function drop(e:MouseEvent):void {
  	e.target.stopDrag();
}

Recently I was working on a project that I was using MouseEvent.DOUBLE_CLICK and the darn thing wasn’t firing no matter how many times that I’ve clicked on it. After awhile I remember that most  Flex component actually have a doubleClickEnable property . Guess what was the result of the trace when I did

1

trace(image.doubleClickEnabled) // this will return false

The simple solution for getting MouseEvent.DOUBLE_CLICK to work is to ensure that you set the property of doubleClickEnable to true

1
2

image.doubleClickEnabled = true;
image.addEventListener(MouseEvent.DOUBLE_CLICK, double_click);

Here’s how to show or hide the default items in the Flash Player context menu. If showMenu is set to true (the default), all context menu items appear. If showMenu is set to false, only Settings and About Adobe Flash Player items appear. Note that in actionscript 3 showMenu has been replaced by
showDefaultContextMenu

// Actionscript 2
 
stage.showMenu=false;

 
// Actionscript 3
 
stage.showDefaultContextMenu=false;

In my recent posting on Flash Bitmap maximum width and height, I blog about how Flash bitmapData object has a maximum width and height of 2880 pixel . I was recently contacted by John Keyton who was really nice to point a work around created by Ronald Losbañes that would allow you to create a bitmapData object that is bigger than 2880 pixel in height and width . Here’s the workaround from Ronald Losbañes site.

The trick is to “kidnap” a BitmapData object from a loaded image with dimension over the limit of 2880 pixels (Which flash allows. Huh! Yes Flash can actually handle bitmaps larger the the limit. It just doesn’t let you create one.).

It’s simple. Create a dummy image with the dimension you need. Save it and make it accessible to Flash. Dynamically load it using ActionScript. And take the loader object’s BitmapData object. That’s why I termed it “kidnap”. We are actually just taking the child of the parent object(loader object), which is the BitmapData, and use it like we build it ourselves.

Here’s the actionscript ,

// 1. Create an image loader and
var DummyImageLoader:Loader = new Loader;
 
// 2. Assign a function to “kidnap” the BitmapData object
DummyImageLoader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, DummyImageOnComplete);
 
// 3. Load the image with the preferred dimension
var DummyImageRequest:URLRequest = new URLRequest(“dummy_image.jpg”);
DummyImageLoader.load(DummyImageRequest);
 
function DummyImageOnComplete(evt:Event):void {
     var DummyImageBitmap = Bitmap(DummyImageLoader.content);
     // “kidnap” the BitmapData object
    var ValidBitmapData:BitmapData = DummyImageBitmap.bitmapData;
 
    // you can now use ValidBitmapData to draw any element larger than 2880×2880
}
 
var InvalidBitmapData:BitmapData = new BitmapData(3000, 3000);

Big thanks to John to pointing out the link to me and Ronald Losbañes for the solution.

Recently I was working with a flash image zoom application and realized that after launching the application it kept crashing when it was loading the larger image, I’ve checked every where and nothing seems to be wrong. File name , image size , file location were all correct. After awhile I realized that the maximum width and maximum height of a BitmapData object is 2880 pixels.  The image that I was working with was way more bigger than that.  Anything that has a height and width that is larger than 2880 will cause flash unable to redraw the bitmap.

Here’s what Adobe has to say about the maximum width and height

Note: The maximum dimensions of a bitmap in Flash Player is limited to 2880 pixels in either direction (width or height). If you attempt to create a BitmapData instance that is larger than this restriction, the Bitmap will not be created. This limit is in place to keep people from creating Flash movies that gobble up the client’s RAM. A bitmap that is 2880 x 2880 pixels, will use roughly 32MB of RAM.

Also interestingly enough

An instance of the BitmapData object can eat up the viewer’s memory quickly. Every pixel in a bitmap is stored using 4 bytes of memory (1 byte per color channel ARGB). If you create a bitmap that is 500 x 500 pixels in size, it will take up close to 1MB of RAM. If you don’t need a BitmapData object anymore, then it is good practice to free the memory that the bitmap is using. The BitmapData class has a method that enables you to do just this, the dispose() method.

So the solution to remove unwanted BitmapData object is to use the following

myBitmap.dispose()

Recently I was working on a Flex project and realize upon having my project on the live server , I couldn’t retrieve the height and width property of my loaded image by doing below

var img:Image = new Image();
img.source = "image.jpg"
trace(img.height);
trace(img.width);

The trace statement above will just show 0 for both width and height. Of course after a few hours of searching Google for a solution I realized on the livedocs documentation for Image has the property contentWidth and contentHeight which provides the height and width of the image loaded.

var img:Image = new Image();
img.source = "image.jpg"
trace(img.contentHeight);
trace(img.contentWidth);

Recently I was writing an application for Flex which I wanted to know about client-machine’s capabilities in order to provide optimal experience on my application. After searching around, I found the Capabilities API in Action script 3. This became extremely helpful as I can know figure out a things on my client machine to make my application more client orientated. For example there was a couple of things that I needed to know such as

• What is client’s screen-resolution?
• What is client’s Operating-System (OS)?
• What is Adobe Flash runtime (Flash Player or AIR) version?
• What is system-language (English or German etc) of the machine?
• What is player type (Standalone or browser-plugin)?
• Does client have audio/video support?
• Does client support accessibility aids (screen-readers etc)?
• Does client support SSL/TLS transport?
• Is client allowed to use Microphone/Webcam (in restricted/administrated environments – corporates/institutes etc)?

Adobe Flash runtimes (Flash Player and AIR) provide Capabilities API to know all these (above and more) about client-machine. You can use various static properties to determine various capabilities of client machine. Here’s an example of the outputs the values found in the flash.system.Capabilities object using several calls to trace().

package {
    import flash.display.Sprite;
    import flash.system.Capabilities;
 
    public class CapabilitiesExample extends Sprite {
        public function CapabilitiesExample() {
            showCapabilities();
        }
 
        private function showCapabilities():void {
            trace("avHardwareDisable: " + Capabilities.avHardwareDisable);
            trace("hasAccessibility: " + Capabilities.hasAccessibility);
            trace("hasAudio: " + Capabilities.hasAudio);
            trace("hasAudioEncoder: " + Capabilities.hasAudioEncoder);
            trace("hasEmbeddedVideo: " + Capabilities.hasEmbeddedVideo);
            trace("hasMP3: " + Capabilities.hasMP3);
            trace("hasPrinting: " + Capabilities.hasPrinting);
            trace("hasScreenBroadcast: " + Capabilities.hasScreenBroadcast);
            trace("hasScreenPlayback: " + Capabilities.hasScreenPlayback);
            trace("hasStreamingAudio: " + Capabilities.hasStreamingAudio);
            trace("hasVideoEncoder: " + Capabilities.hasVideoEncoder);
            trace("isDebugger: " + Capabilities.isDebugger);
            trace("language: " + Capabilities.language);
            trace("localFileReadDisable: " + Capabilities.localFileReadDisable);
            trace("manufacturer: " + Capabilities.manufacturer);
            trace("os: " + Capabilities.os);
            trace("pixelAspectRatio: " + Capabilities.pixelAspectRatio);
            trace("playerType: " + Capabilities.playerType);
            trace("screenColor: " + Capabilities.screenColor);
            trace("screenDPI: " + Capabilities.screenDPI);
            trace("screenResolutionX: " + Capabilities.screenResolutionX);
            trace("screenResolutionY: " + Capabilities.screenResolutionY);
            trace("serverString: " + Capabilities.serverString);
            trace("version: " + Capabilities.version);
        }
    }
}

Previously, in ActionScript 2.0, you could pass variables along the query string or using FlashVars and the variables would be available in _level0, in ActionScript 3.0, it is a bit different . In Actionscript 3 variables that are passed in through query string have been moved to the parameters property of LoaderInfo instance. Here’s a real simple way to retrieve flash variable in Actionscript 3

1
2
3
4

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="550" height="400" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0">
     <param name="src" value="somefilename.swf?fileName=info" />
     <embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="550" height="400" src="somefilename.swf?fileName=info"></embed>
</object>

To access the query string fileName in Actionscript 3 , all you have to do in your actionscript 3 source code is

1
2

var fileName:String = new String();
fileName = root.loaderInfo.parameters.fileName

Here’s another way to loop through your flash variables

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17

var tf:TextField = new TextField();
tf.autoSize = TextFieldAutoSize.LEFT;
tf.border = true;
addChild(tf);
 
tf.appendText("params:" + "\n");
try {
    var keyStr:String;
    var valueStr:String;
    var paramObj:Object = LoaderInfo(this.root.loaderInfo).parameters;
    for (keyStr in paramObj) {
        valueStr = String(paramObj[keyStr]);
        tf.appendText("\t" + keyStr + ":\t" + valueStr + "\n");
    }
} catch (error:Error) {
    tf.appendText(error.toString());
}

Recently I was working on a flash project that was using Actionscript 2 and it was such a pain trying to use loadClip() and pass in the necessary variables through query string for loading the external swf into a movieclip. I figure I’ll post this here and hopefully someone who is trying to do so can spend less time goggling for the answer

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

// here I set the values of the query string 
// for external swf that I want to pass in
// ie. h , w , and img
contentHolder_mc.h = h;
contentHolder_mc.w = w;
contentHolder_mc.img = img;
 
contentHolder_mc.loadMovie("nameOfYourSwf","GET");