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.

Just a note about a little bug I see in the Flash8 IDE. It's been around for quite a while. I remember seeing Keith Peters pointing it out after MX2004 came out, but haven't seen much else mentioned about it.

Here's what it does.. say you're trying to streamline your production so you make some cool custom panels for your IDE.. you drop the SWFs for those into your "WindowSWFs" folder here (example path for a windowsXP box)
C:\Documents and Settings\{yourusername}\Local Settings\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash 8\en\Configuration\WindowSWF

That custom panel is then listed in the Flash IDE under Window>Other Panels> menu.
(That's just freakin awesome. I can't tell you how much time I've saved over the years with this one little feature. )

Now, the fun stuff. Lets say you have 5 SWFs in that folder for 5 different panels. In the "Other Panels" menu they show up as:
WindowSWF_1
WindowSWF_2
WindowSWF_3
WindowSWF_4
WindowSWF_5

Once this bug hits you never know what you'll get when you select WindowSWF_1 from the menu.. it might be the _3 panel, or maybe _4 opens.. and you can try opening all of them but you'll get duplicates of some and so never see that one you really need to use. It's kind of like Russian roulette when it starts.

I'm not sure what triggers it.. but once it starts it's locked in there and happens consistently. What fixes it? For me a reboot seems to do the trick until it strikes again. I probably hit this once a week or so.. so not a huge, major pita..

Again, it's been reported long ago, so just letting folks know that if you do hit this.. just reboot.. go get coffee..

You know it’s a bad day when one of your 50+ classes spews this:

**Warning** The class definition for ‘yourclass’ exceeds the bytecode
limit of 32,767K. Please extract some functionality into other classes
or risk unexpected behavior at runtime.

The solution in case you need it..

(from one of my co-workers who says he now likes Flash less than ever)
(I’m working on this big project.. that’s why I’ve been quiet..)