oddhammer

It was a day I hoped would never happen, but I sat down this weekend and updated my little US national debt clock to display over $10,000,000,000,000. I say it's a sad day because despite what some people say (that the further in debt our country is the more prosperous we are) I find it hard to believe we're better off because of the debt we've just taken on. The whole concept of "money as debt" just seems corrupt. Then again, I'm not an expert on economics. Maybe having our national debt increasing at the rate of $36 per millisecond is a good thing.

The debt clock started when a friend e-mailed me a years ago and asked how to do a counter like a clock that starts at a specific point. He needed it in Flash so I whipped one together and sent it to him and then realized I could maybe do something worthwhile by putting it out there for people to use. I did.. and it hit myspace and facebook.. and I'm currently seeing about 65,000 views of it each month. I encouraged people to download it and install it on their own servers (it's not sucking too much bandwidth, but they shouldn't have to wait on my server for their page to finish loading..) so I'm not sure how many views it's getting that way.. I know it's being used on quite a few political web sites (both Republicans and Democrats running for Congress for example), in articles, and on some personal web sites.

I don't fuss with the accuracy of it since I figure if they can pull a number like $700,000,000,000 out of thin air just because it's "a really large number" then there's no point in trying to be too accurate on anything based on numbers provided by the same folks. I like to think that over the last few years I've helped a tiny bit to raise awareness of our out of control spending.. I can hope it's not too late to sort things out and maybe someday I'll be able to reverse the clock.

Some people don't like submitting bug reports about specific issues, but would rather just complain about general problems that bug the crap out of them. For those people there is the Dear Adobe site.

I don't particularly like the idea of smearing a company for no good reason, but if the people who are using the site have submitted bug tickets and feel like Adobe is ignoring them then I guess they have every right to complain.. or just use another product. That's part of how free market economics is supposed to work? If you find a better product then use it. And if the masses yell their complaints loud enough and the company is nimble enough then it'll fix the issues and keep the business.

Here's one I found: "please allow Flash's action window to stay visible when another app is in front, sometimes you need to compare code to something else." .. been an irritation for me for years and has been reported to Macromedia and Adobe many times. It's one of those "minor" issues that becomes major if you have to use the application a lot. I'm pretty sure I saw on one of the demos or heard through the grapevine that this has been changed in CS4.. so when you have the Actions panel open and switch over to another app the Actions panel remains visible. So maybe they did react and fix that. I'll keep my fingers crossed for code folding.

This is just a really basic example of using onSetFocus.. for those of you who are looking into making your Flash movies 508 compliant. 

Just Click here and then hit tab a few times until you see a yellow box around one of the buttons




Get the FLA here if you need it

Ok.. this is a “fugly” hack to get subscript and superscript support in dynamic text fields in Flash… it was my somewhat successful attempt to get around the fact that you can’t get subscript characters into dynamic text fields by using the HTML <sup> or <sub> tags, there’s nothing in the CSS support in Flash, and there’s no .subscript or .superscript properties for the textFormat object.  So basically if you want to show 2⁴ or 1423¹²⁽ⁿ²⁾ or I₂ in a dynamic text field in Flash you’re kind of screwed (unless you do some whacked out hack like I did).

So basically what I found is a set of unicode characters in Microsoft Sans Serif (the only font that I could find that had 0-9, n, (), and [] in both superscript and subscript) and embedded them in the SWF.  I then have code that will look through an HTML string for subscript or superscript tags and replace the text within them with the corresponding unicode characters....  there’s also a function that looks for the unicode characters, and if it finds any in a string it will replace them with plain ASCII characters wrapped in either the sup or sub tag..  a hack that basically gives Flash support for a limited range of superscript and subscript characters. 

If anybody has suggestions please lemme know.. 

See the SWF here
Get the FLA here

oh… and PLEASE go submit a request to Macromedia to add support for the <sub> and <sup> tags.  http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/