Flash MX Bugs/Issues

A list of bugs/issues and general 'gotchas' discovered in Flash MX - if you've found something worth noting Contact Me

Flash 6 Player Non-Termination of Downloads (Bug)

Update: The latest version of the Flash 6 player available from www.macromedia.com has fixed this bug.

Detailed description here at Actionscript.com: "A major bug has been found in the Flash 6 player which effects all Flash movies using streaming features ... The problem lies within terminating downloads executed by loadMovie, and loadSound in the new Flash 6 player."

This is a major bug that's been reported extensively. Macromedia are aware of the problem and are working on it  (check the FlashKit thread for the MM feedback)

International Character Support (Gotcha/Lack of Documentation)

Lots of questions about this, Lee Thomason from Macromedia cleared up some of the issues with the info below:

In the authoring tool: In the MX authoring tool, you can enter any characters in your current code page. For English (and other European) systems, this is Latin-1 or MacRoman. The OS doesn't support the entry of Chinese characters (for example) into entry fields because the code page doesn't support it.

For actionscript, you can work around this by #include of an actionscript file. The .as file should be UTF8 and contain the first line:

//!-- UTF8

so that MX will know its a UTF-8 text file. You can put any characters in any language in that file that you wish, and should be correctly displayed by the Flash Player.

In the Flash player: The Flash player is completely Unicode. It can display in any language available on your OS, and take input in any language supported by your OS. This varies by OS: NT, 2K, and XP will allow an English system to run a Japanese IME, which will put Japanese characters into dynamic text fields, mixed with any other language you have input support for. Output is supported in any language you have font packs for. (Although it is limited to left to right character sets.) The 9x kernels are somewhat more limited, but still support multi language output in almost all cases.

When loading data (via LoadVariables or XML) the Flash 6 player will assume UTF-8 encoding unless system.useCodepage = true, in which case it will load in the current codepage, Latin-1 in the case above. This does mean that if you load Latin-1 data, that contains high ASCII, into a Flash Player 6 without useCodepage set, it will be garbage! The encoding is not set correctly. You need to use UTF-8 data or set useCodepage.

Bandwidth Profiler (Bug)
The Flash MX bandwith profiler is a bit hosed - it uses the uncompressed size of the .swf to generate the streaming graph instead of the compressed size (MX uses compression to reduce SWF file size). This causes problems when you use 'Show Streaming' as it gives a practically useless view of download speed. It's a known issue at Macromedia (thanks Nigel) but it's not documented on the MM site.

Dynamically Loading JPEG's (Gotcha/Lack of Documentation)
Make sure your jpeg's aren't progressively encoded or optimised. Flash will only load in standard jpeg's.

Eval statement in MX (Gotcha)
MX does not allow the eval statement to be used on the left side of an argument, throwing up the error
'Left side of assignment operator must be variable or property" .
Check this technote for workarounds.

Last Updated : 21/04/2003; 22:47:47

© Copyright 2003 . David Burrows