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.

You know it’s a bad day when one of your 50+ classes spews this:

**Warning** The class definition for ‘yourclass’ exceeds the bytecode
limit of 32,767K. Please extract some functionality into other classes
or risk unexpected behavior at runtime.

The solution in case you need it..

(from one of my co-workers who says he now likes Flash less than ever)
(I’m working on this big project.. that’s why I’ve been quiet..)

ok, I spent a good bit of time chasing this one down.  the conclusion I’ve come to is that there’s a bug in the “debug” version of the Flash Player 7,0,19,0 that makes it impossible to use SetVariable to communicate between JavaScript and Flash.

With Flash Player 7,0,19,0 _debug_
I can get SetVariable to work in Internet Explorer 6.0..
I can get SetVariable to work in Netscape 7.1
I can’t get SetVariable to work with Firefox 1.0

a couple of other folks who wrestled with this..
http://www.markme.com/teammmflash/archives/005316.cfm  (last comment)
http://www.flashsupport.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1133  (post from dj_roeeze - note that he found that getting a different version of the FP fixed it.. )

Once I un-install the debug Player and install the standard Player my SetVariable code works just fine in IE, Netscape, or Firefox 1.0.  Wee.. 

If this isn’t the case.. and you are able to get SetVariable to work with the debug version of the Flash Player while using Firefox 1.0.. please comment.

((note.. see my comment from April 26th for a solution))