Here’s what it looks like when I click on symbols in the library in CS4..

Those could be symbols of cars, monkeys, baseballs..  it doesn’t matter.  I get horizontal lines. 

It’s been this way for a while and I’ve just been avoiding the inevitable reinstall and kind of enjoying the little bit of chaos that this brings into my workspace.  It’s time for it to end though.  I need to see what I’m about to drag out onto the stage instead of it being a surprise.  heh.  My library is a box of chocolates.. I never know what I’m going to get until I drag it to the stage.

A small issue with Flash Player 9 shows up when you do this AS2 code:

styles = new TextField.StyleSheet();
styles.setStyle(".green", {fontSize: '24px', color: '#00CC00'} );
//styles.setStyle(".almostblack", {color: '#010000'} );

this.createTextField("theField_txt", 1, 10, 10, 300, 300);
theField_txt.multiline=true; theField_txt.html = true;
theField_txt.styleSheet = this.styles;

var theHTML='<ul><li>stuff</li><li>some green text: <span class="almostblack"> </span><span class="green">Green!</span></li><li>more stuff</li></ul>'

theField_txt.htmlText = theHTML

will show up like this:



If you uncomment the almostblack style then the green bullet will look black.


If you make the almostblack style color really black 000000 instead of almost black, then the bullet will be green.

I'm assuming this will get fixed at some point and when that happens the almostblack hack won't really do anything other than be extra code that needs to be removed.
If/when it gets fixed then any pretty colored bullets made by doing this
var theHTML='<ul><li>stuff</li><li> <span class="green"> </span>black text with a green bullet</li><li>more stuff</li></ul>'
will suddenly be black.

there's also this
var theHTML='<ul><li>stuff</li><li><span class="green"> </span>black text with a black bullet</li><li>more stuff</li></ul>'
which makes a jumbo sized black bullet.

I was having a bit of trouble with the Flash v2 scrollpane again…  it was cutting off the bottom of loaded content because the scrollbar wouldn’t go all the way to the bottom.  I thought the last time I had this same problem it was solved with an onComplete() to the scrollpane, but it turned out to be a little more.  Read on if you don’t already know the solution..  or shoot..  read on because you might have a better solution. ..  not that this is really a solution.

The installer for Central is broken.. I reported it on Friday, but unfortunately the tech support feature on the Adobe site doesn’t list “Central” so I had to report it as a problem with the closest thing on the list “Flash Player”..  so it might not have gotten noticed or if it was noticed it’s just a very low priority.  Central is a lame duck since Apollo has been discussed quite a bit and is supposed to be out before the end of the year, but I can’t recall seeing anything saying that Central should no longer be installed.  I’m assuming that since the installer badge is still there that something is just temporarily broken.

Why do I care?  I had an app that I developed last year to demo things at a conference.  It’s conference time again and I was asked if the little Central app could be used again.  I checked if it could be installed (it could..at the time) and said sure.  Now I have to scramble to find another solution that will do what I need.  Central has always been a “beta” so it’s always been a gamble and it looks like I got stung by it.  Ugh.  Luckily it’s easy enough to port it over to a standard SWF, publish as EXE, etc.. so the code isn’t totally lost.