As promised, here are the details for the Hands-on: Best Practices Flash and Flex Development course I will be teaching starting February 3rd-4th, 2005 in London, UK. This is the follow-up course to Hands-on: Introduction to ActionScript 2 course which I will be teaching in January.

New - View the e-brochure: FlashPaper (591kb), PDF (836kb)

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Yesterday, I posted on how I was running into trouble with the TextArea component when trying to display HTML content with multiple images. The scrollbar/thumb would not initialize correctly. Today, I was able to narrow down the problem to a timing issue and offer a workaround that involved some voodoo: Asking the TextArea component to redraw itself after a certain amount of time. Where the voodoo came into place was determining exactly how much time was needed as the component (actually, the TextField used in the label) doesn't have an event to notify you that it has initialized with new content.

I'm happy to report that I now have a much better solution: I wrote a class that decorates a TextArea and handles the scrollbar fix for you automatically. (It's not a complete Decorator implementation as it doesn't pass unhandled requests to the actual component but I thought that would be overkill. You're more than welcome to implement this with a trusty __resolve if you feel the need to! :))

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Did you know that Flash can generate image maps? I didn't! I came across it while rummaging through the docs for every scrap of information on the TextArea component and TextField following the recent bug I ran into.

Check out the man page for this on LiveDocs. I quote: "Flash can generate an image map to show any image and maintain the function of buttons that link to URLs. When an HTML template includes the $IM template variable, Flash inserts the image map code. The $IU variable identifies the name of the GIF, JPEG, or PNG file."

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One of the things that has annoyed me for the longest time is the lack of wildcard selection in Windows Explorer. If you remember DOS, then you'll know what I'm talking about. In DOS you could type, for example, dir *.fla to see a listing of all your FLAs or dir data_*.sql to see files named data_0001.sql, data_0002.sql or data_did_he_really_die_in_the_last_film.sql.

Happily, I will be annoyed no longer because I just installed the free/open-source Windows Explorer wildcard selection shell extension by Matthijs Hollemans. It lets you right click in a folder and select files using wildcards.

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Can someone please confirm that the TextArea component's scrollbar becomes completely useless when displaying HTML content with images? It bears no relation to the amount of content in the TextArea and the thumb is set to the wrong size. Please, someone tell me I'm not losing my mind! Anyone?

Update: To narrow it down - The scrollbar works correctly when there is one image in the HTML but not when there are two or three.

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