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This is a weird bug/feature I found in Flash a week or two ago. I like to declare my variables in classes like this: Well, I was working on a project a few weeks ago and I had a class that looked something like this: Throughout the SWF I code like this: When I traced dataOb, I got this output: But I only added “info 1” and “info 2” to the dataOb.info array? Why would “info 3” and “info 4” be in their too? It seems as though if you declare a variable as an array in the variable declaration and dont re-initalizie it in the constructor (IE, info = []) then the array will be shared across instances of the class. This effect doesn’t seem to happen with number declaration like the one in the example electric class I posted…

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I was working on a flash-based project recently which consisted of alot of bitmaps. I always export my bitmaps from Photoshop as png-24, since I always find they yield the best results and have the best support for transparency. The problem I was having in the project I was working on was that when I imported the image, it work look fine- just as how I outputted it from Photoshop. But when I exported the movie, the bitmap lost some of details and replaced jagged grungy edges with straight ones, this was not what I wanted since the site was a ruff & grungy style. I finally discovered that Flash was exporting the image as a jpg, changing it to exporting as a png fixed the problem giving the me the jagged grungy lines I was looking for.

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Flash has so many weird odd bugs it’s sickening. I was working with a simple timeline animation in Flash that looked like this: On the timeline was a shape tween that was acting as a mask for two MC’s. I had some initialization code that I only wanted to fire once contained in one of the MC’s, but for some reason it was called twice because the MC was being instantiated twice. I couldn’t figure out why the MC was being instantiated twice, so eventually I took a shot in the dark and converted the shape in the shape tween to a symbol. It worked and the code only fired once. So in the end my timeline looked like this:

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What I’ve always found a major pain in Flash was delaying a function call from being called for a short period of time. The only reasonable way to do it was to call setInterval() and then clearInterval() after the function was called. I had to keep a intermediate variable to keep the interval id that setInterval() returned. This was a major pain and often ended up in cluttering up my project with code like this: I hate having to make intermediate variable & functions to accomplish really simple task. I came across Tom Rethaller’s schedule() method on proto.layer51.com and it was just what i was looking for except it had some scope issues and wouldn’t allow you to schedule the same function to be called on multiple instances of a object…

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