Sometimes nasty and seemingly inexplicable bugs just get on your case.

You have a Flash app… its sweet, all working on every browser, every platform… until the client calls up and says “its crashing on Firefox Windows”. You do not believe the client. How can that be? Its Flash. Its supposed to be consistent across all browsers. But no… we have suffered DEEP nightmares with browser-specific issues in Flash recently.

This one is a quick fix.

If you are suffering crashes with your Flash app in Firefox Windows, or you have a textfield that is not responding to the PC input of the “@” symbol… but only to where the symbol would be on a Mac – ie. SHIFT-2, then check to see if your Flash app’s HTML container has the “wmode” parameter explicitly set. If it IS set, remove it. In our case, this fixed the app, and saved our day from a hellish and probably soul-destroying bug-hunt.

We are using SWFObject to embed the app. Here is the culprit:

Not working

var flashVars = { vars: "notShown" };

var flashParams = {
menu: "false",
allowScriptAccess: "sameDomain",
scale: "noscale",
wmode:"opaque" };

swfobject.embedSWF("app.swf", "flashContent", "950", "600", "9.0.0", "/assets/swf/expressInstall.swf",  flashVars, flashParams, {id:"appID"});

Working

var flashVars = { vars: "notShown" };

var flashParams = {
menu: "false",
allowScriptAccess: "sameDomain",
scale: "noscale" };
*** NOTE - wmode param removed ***

swfobject.embedSWF("app.swf", "flashContent", "950", "600", "9.0.0", "/assets/swf/expressInstall.swf",  flashVars, flashParams, {id:"appID"});

Been banging my head off a wall all day wondering why SWFAddress 2.1 wasn’t firing on initialising. The answer is pretty simple – you HAVE to make sure you include “id” in the optional attributes or it just won’t work. Here’s what I had (wasn’t working):

swfobject.embedSWF("darey_v2.swf", "flashContent", "100%", "100%", "9.0.0", "assets/swf/expressInstall.swf", null, params,null);

and it didn’t work… but I changed it to this:

swfobject.embedSWF("darey_v2.swf", "flashContent", "100%", "100%", "9.0.0", "assets/swf/expressInstall.swf", {}, params, {id: "dareysite"});

… and its all sweet – note the extra {id:"id_goes_here"} bit as the last argument to the static embedSWF function.

Steve Jones, creative director here. I have decided to start using Twitter because I just liked it from the first moment I saw it, in the same way as I instantly hated Facebook.

First thing I noticed was that the API situation for Flash was pretty woeful, so I’m writing a bunch of new “TwitterService” classes right now – starting from scratch – and will “tweet” the URL to the ZIP of AS3 files when I’m done. If anyone else fancies jumping in to develop them, that will be cool.

G-RAFF ON TWITTER

Manically busy at the moment, hence the sorry lack of updates. Moving into a new office next week, writing a killer PureMVC/PaperVision3D app for a big company you all know, working on a lovely trio of sites for Nigerian superstar Dare Art Alade, microsite for Orion Books, a great new community-funded film site, new stuff for Suburbia Media as they launched LOVE magazine, just about to go live with Bermondsey 167… the list goes on.

We’re also looking for freelance Flash developers if anyone is around. Familiarity with PureMVC will be a good help. Please don’t even launch your email client unless you are serious.

EDIT: Now 00:10 on Sunday night (no, its not Monday morning until I wake up) and I have just launched FlashTwitter as an open-source beginning to a decent Flash API for Twitter. I’ve had fun during the day, and hope this will be of some use.

Suburbia Media are celebrating 20 issues of their seminal fashion magazine Pop. They asked us to deliver a simple Flash intro which shows all the covers from the issues. So here it is.

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