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.

I'm doing some experimenting and trying to update some very old projects and getting kind of off the beaten track and finding some weirdness in Flash CS3 IDE..

If I open a custom panel that I've made and dropped into the windowswf folder, or if I open a panel someone else has made, I can right click somewhere on it and I get the full Flash Player context menu (Zoom In, Zoom Out, 100%, Show All, Quality, etc) and I can even add to that context menu via my code in the windowSWF. Now in other panels such as Window>Other Panels>Accessibility that are from Adobe you don't get that context menu.

So that breaks the user experience some.. but it gets even more broken. In my custom panels if I try using the "flyout" menu in the upper right corner of that panel all I see is "Help" in the menu. Clicking that takes me to the Help page for the Movie Explorer panel. Huh? I've tried this with custom panels from other folks and see the same thing.

I would expect if I specify a custom context menu from a WindowSWF that the menu items would show up in that little flyout menu but that is not what is happening. There might be some secret way of adding to that flyout menu and also disabling the "flash player" context menu that shows up in my windowSWFs. If you know that secret please share it.

Here's my wtf moment for the day (or night.. it was a long Sunday night or work): I'm in the Flash 8 IDE and can create these nifty .clr and .act files and drop them into
C:\Documents and Settings\*user*\Local Settings\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash 8\en\Configuration\Color Sets
along with the other .clr files (greyscale, mac, tone, windows) and assume they're going to show up on a menu somewhere, right? I mean.. then I could bundle the little .clr files up in a MXP file, share it with others and have them enjoy the goodness. ? Not that I can find.. they have to go into a flyout menu and choose "Add Colors" each freakin time they want to enjoy the rainbow of colors. wtf?...

oh.. wait a minute.. so there's sort of a way .. gee.. so the user has to choose that little flyout menu on the Color Swatches panel, choose Add Colors, and then "Save As Default". That's easy enough, even if it is kind of klunky. I guess you get used to using that flyout menu since you have to use it to delete the little color swatches, eh?

It sure would be nice if my swatches could get listed like that "Web 216" in the flyout menu. Yeah, that same Web 216 menu item that I haven't used for oh ...years.

I found a couple of .clr files for the old swatches panel though..

I updated to Internet Explorer 7 (I heard someone call it Internet Exploder the other day.. lol.. I hadn't heard that in a while.. ) to check some things out, and noticed that when I was in the Flash IDE I couldn't use ctrl + the scrollwheel to change font size for the Help panel. I wasn't sure that IE7 was to blame until today when I finally got tired of squinting at the help panel and un-installed IE7. Un-installing IE7 was actually easy, I just went into "Add remove programs" and clicked the "Remove" button. After un-installing IE7 I can now use the scroll wheel to change font size again. cool.

Now you might be wondering why I don't just listen to the technote and change the CSS to whatever font size I want? Well.. I have 3 monitors and run different resolutions. I like to be able to drag the Help panel to different monitors every so often, and that means I need to change the font size on the fly.