Flassari.is

I’ve noticed recently that Firefox has started showing a 1px dotted border around flash objects when I click on them. It didn’t bother me enough to look for a solution, but today the solution found me.
In my rss reader a blog post from FlashComGuru pops up, showing how to get rid of this annoyance, pasted here for your convenience:

Simply add this to your page’s stylesheet:

a:focus, object:focus { outline: none; -moz-outline-style: none; }

I just recently upgraded my wordpress system, and now it does not show my embedded flash at all. I would be surprised, but this isn’t the first time this happens.
The last time I upgraded I found a blog post on how to fix it, but it’s been a while and I just can’t find that post any more, so I’m writing my own.

So this is the deal: I always embed my flash using the html code that SWFobject recommends:

<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" width="780" height="420">
  <param name="movie" value="myContent.swf" />
  <!--[if !IE]>-->
  <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="myContent.swf" width="780" height="420">
  <!--<![endif]-->
    <p>Alternative content</p>
  <!--[if !IE]>-->
  </object>
  <!--<![endif]-->
</object>

After the upgrade, instead of my pretty flash objects I get this funky arrow in my posts:

–>

And if I look at the source, it now looks like this:

<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" width="780" height="420">
  <param name="movie" value="myContent.swf" />
  <!--[if !IE]>&#8211;>
  <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="myContent.swf" width="780" height="420">
  <!--<![endif]-->
    <p>Alternative content</p>
  <!--[if !IE]>&#8211;>
  </object>
  <!--<![endif]-->
</object>

Apparently wordpress replaces
<!–[if !IE]>—>
with
<!–[if !IE]>&#8211;>, but when I look into my post to edit it, it still looks fine there.

The reason is that wordpress is trying to make your writing prettier, even if you don’t use the wysiwyg editor. To stop wordpress from doing that, go into your wordpress directory and edit the file wp-includes/formatting.php. On lines 55 and 56 (for version 2.8.5) you should see this text:

$static_characters = array_merge(array('---', ' -- ', '--', ' - ', 'xn–', '...', '``', ''s', '''', ' (tm)'), $cockney);
$static_replacements = array_merge(array('—', ' — ', '–', ' – ', 'xn--', '…', $opening_quote, '’s', $closing_quote, ' ™'), 

If not, just look for it, it should be in the top page or two.
Now all you have to do is comment out the array elements you don’t want wordpress to replace. My lines look like this:

$static_characters = array_merge(array(/*'---', ' -- ', '--', ' - ', */'xn–', '...', '``', ''s', '''', ' (tm)'), $cockney);
$static_replacements = array_merge(array(/*'—', ' — ', '–', ' – ', */'xn--', '…', $opening_quote, '’s', $closing_quote, ' ™'), 

Hope this helps.

I’m working on a big project and was having some problems with memory leaks. After some google-ing around I found this great video on AdobeTV by Jun Heider where he shows you how to profile both the memory and performance of your AS3 or Flex application.
It’s pretty thorough and it is little over one hour in length.

Sometimes you want to be able to keep your fonts in a seperate swf file, a “font library” if you will, that you can load dynamically on runtime. Here’s how to do that in AS3:

The first thing you have to do is create a new flash file to store the font(s). Then, right click the library and select “New Font…”.

Choose the font you want to embed and give it a name. Any name will do here, as this is only the library name and will not affect our code in any way. I prefer to name the font with the same name as the linkage name I plan to give it.

Click ok, and then right click the font in the library and select “Linkage…”. Check the “Export for ActionScript” and “Export in first frame” options, give your font the linkage name of your own liking and click OK.

And now you’re ready. Export the file to swf and there’s your font resource file.

If you want to use that font, you first have to load it into the application domain, and then register it on the global font list using the Font.registerFont function. The textfield can’t display it until it has the embedFonts property set to true and the font name in its textformat.
You can see an example in the following code, ready to be pasted into your frame:

var l:Loader = new Loader();
l.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onLoaded);
l.load(new URLRequest("MyFont.swf"), new LoaderContext(false, ApplicationDomain.currentDomain));

function onLoaded(e:Event):void {
	// Register the font to the global font list
	Font.registerFont( Class( ApplicationDomain.currentDomain.getDefinition("MyFont")));
	
	myTextField.embedFonts = true;
	// instantiate the font just to get the real font name, or if you know the name before hand you can just hard-code it in here
	var fontName:String = new (ApplicationDomain.currentDomain.getDefinition("MyFont"))().fontName;
	var tf:TextFormat = new TextFormat(fontName);
	// Set the text format for the text already in the text field
	myTextField.setTextFormat(tf);
	// and for future changes
	myTextField.defaultTextFormat = tf;
}