Wednesday, June 26, 2002

Draggable Pane - A Major Pain
Working on JabberCheckers, a multiplayer Flash/Jabber implementation of checkers, (screenshot available here) has forced me to learn a lot about Actionscript, Flash MX and their various nuances. I've been trying to use the new UI components wherever appropriate in JabberCheckers. Unfortunately, this has revealed many of their (or possibly my) flaws.

I love pixel fonts. I intentionally turn Quartz text rendering off in my browsers (IE, Mozilla) because it just blurs small text beyond reason, especially on my LCD display. It would be nice to be able to use pixel fonts in dynamic text fields in Flash. Unfortunately, Flash always finds some way to muck them up. They are only useful in static text fields, which for me means they are not useful at all.

In an attempt at compromise, I tried using device fonts. I quickly discovered that device fonts and the scroll pane/draggable pane components don't mix.

Maybe someone can help me out on this next one - the draggable pane component. It works fine, but if I use MovieClip.attachMovie to load a pane, click the close button on the pane, and then attach the pane again it breaks. It loses all my formatting from globalStyleFormat, the close button is mysteriously disabled, scroll content is lost, and I get very frustrated.

Hopefully I'll figure this one out soon.