flash 10 bugs: fullscreen crashes due to hardware acceleration

I’ve noticed some issues ever since I installed Flash Player 10 with my Flex apps. Both of which involve fullscreen, and both of which won’t occur if the user disables hardware acceleration.

The first is fairly simple, under Remote Desktop, if you run a Flex app that renders in fullscreen, it will crash every time. This mainly affects users in offices running on thin clients. The workaround for the moment is to disable hardware acceleration. See the bug post here.

The second is more complicated.

Basically, the only way I could reproduce it was to render fullscreen over a HorizontalBox after you’ve fiddled with the box a little. I’ve had it happen over all sorts of components, not just HorizontalBox (even VBox and HBox). Again the principal workaround is to disable Hardware Acceleration. The other workaround I’ve found is to hide the HorizontalBox whilst the user is in fullscreen, and then to turn it back on once they return to normal viewing. See the bug post here.

If these issues have been affecting you, I’d advise you to watch the above bugs and receive updates from Adobe about them.

Both of these bugs have been introduced with Flash Player 10, and both have been with Adobe now for a few months. Hopefully we’ll see these fixed soon.

Flex 3 : IE 6 : SSL and mixed secure items

Bleh.

This wasn’t a fun one to try to debug.

Essentially, I moved a flex project over to SSL. This meant a simple header redirect on all requests and using the Secure AMF channel for remoting. No problems.

But wait, IE 6 starts throwing me “This page contains both secure and nonsecure items. Do you want to display the nonsecure items?”

This will be familiar to many people, and it would probably be acceptable if it didn’t keep reloading the page no matter which button I pressed.

One word – WTF? I checked EVERY link and reference and everything was relative and thus HTTPS. FireFox reported that everything was hunky dory, even the favicon, so WTF?

Turns out IE6 doesn’t like iFrame tags without a SRC attribute. Fine. But so what? I’m not using iFrames without SRC tags. Hangabout, checking history.js which is deployed alongside any Flex app, you’ll notice around line 381:

var _initialize = function () {
if (browser.ie)
{
var scripts = document.getElementsByTagName('script');
for (var i = 0, s; s = scripts[i]; i++) {
if (s.src.indexOf("history.js") > -1) {
var iframe_location = (new String(s.src)).replace("history.js", "historyFrame.html");
}
}
historyFrameSourcePrefix = iframe_location + "?";
var src = historyFrameSourcePrefix;
var iframe = document.createElement("iframe");
iframe.id = 'ie_historyFrame';
iframe.name = 'ie_historyFrame';
//iframe.src = historyFrameSourcePrefix;
try {
document.body.appendChild(iframe);
} catch(e) {
setTimeout(function() {
document.body.appendChild(iframe);
}, 0);
}
}

SOLUTION:

Notice the commented line? Strange. I’m not sure why it’s been commented by Adobe, but this is our problem right here. This iframe is causing IE6 to have a cry under SSL.

I’ve uncommented it and since I’m using BrowserManagement instead of HistoryManagement, have found that everything is worked as expected. I’m too tired to go looking to see what minute repercussions there may be, but if anyone has anything to add, please be my guest.

Flex bug: Occasional empty popups and tooltips

OK, this is by far the strangest bug I’ve yet to find in Flex.

Sometimes when I loaded my application, my tooltips and my popups refused to render any content. They were just empty. (See the images below, both the good and the bad). And when I went to debug the application, the properties were still there as they should be, just without the text being rendered.

The closest thing I could find on this out there, were people who were getting a runtime error in Flex 2 when their Modules had problems with the singleton classes such as PopUpManager and DragManager. But then I did some more research and I realised [finally] the problem was that my embedded fonts weren’t always rendering after I loaded in a module.

Ohhhhhh.

So when I removed the embedded fonts, and bobs-your-uncle.

Still, I’d love to know if anybody else has come into this and ways around it…

Flex: 1120: Access of undefined property com

OK, so I’m getting a little tired of this error.

If you too are seeing the hateful “1120: Access of undefined property …” without a line number in Flex, maybe I can help.

I’ve noticed strange happenings when in an ActionScript class, I import MXML components of my own design (I oft for the com namespace). I can’t say why this causes an error, and I cannot easily replicate it, but needless to say, this issue has kept me up. Generally, in my main script file, I have to use a redundant import statement to remove it.

So I have

import com.justinjmoses.packagename.*;

import com.justinjmoses.packagename.SomeClass;

Whenever I modify the main script file, it removes this redundant second import and then throws up the cryptic 1120 error without a line number to help. Imagine the woes for the next developer to work on the product if I didn’t document this highly unusual behaviour.

Another thing I found was once, in a module, importing MXML components and then intiatialising them in actionscript, was causing all my tool tips to die. Weird, huh? Literally, every time you’d navigate to the SWF, no matter the browser, all the tooltip data was removed, leaving small blank boxes. However, if you refreshed, the issue would intermittently go away.

Eventually I traced it to importing MXML classes into my actionscript, though I couldn’t identify exactly what part of it was causing the issue.

Unfortunately, this isn’t one of those small things you can replicate and post to Adobe, but hopefully we can all help each other out with this one.

If you’ve had this issue yourself, please add a comment about it. (Otherwise I’ll get paranoid it’s just me 😉

Flex : IE issues

I have been spending various intermittent hours browser testing my latest Flex app recently, expecting there to be few, if any, differences between runing a Flex app on IE and on FireFox. I have also been doing Safari and Opera testing, though Flash player doesn’t 100% support them (chiefly, the Back button functionality doesn’t work, which is a bit of a pain in the ass).

One bug I found during IE testing was using relative URLs for uploading and downloading files was broken. I was using “../[folder]” to access a root folder (my flex app is inside a folder off the root) and whilst this worked on FireFox, when I went to IE 6 & 7 for testing, found it didn’t. Huh.