Flex : Mac compatibility issues

I’ve been working on a Flex application for the past few months, developing on Windows (as you can imagine with all my Flex.NET talk).

I recently began testing on a Mac, assuming as the version of Flash Player (9.0.115) was the same, that it would handle the same. Oops.

OK, so there aren’t too many issues to deal with, but you will need to ensure you have the Flash Debugger Player on your Mac (see this article on switching your player – you’ll need an Adobe uninstaller for it).

The sort of things that get caught out on a Mac for me were:

• Using the “type” property of a FileReference. (The Flex help discusses this). I’ve just switched to manually taking out the file extension.
• An unused state SetProperty that was trying to set the “x” property of the main container without any corresponding value
• Intermittent issues with using HTTPService to open XML files

Actually, testing on the Mac helped me clean up a few things that would otherwise have gone amiss, so I’m not actually complaining as such 🙂