actionscript still sucks

Michael Barton — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 02:49:15 +0000

The last few days, I’ve been working on a Flash thingy that can grab barcodes from the webcam. This is another part of the project from my last post. It’s actually kind of fun getting my hands dirty with pixels again.

If you’re wondering what that white space below the webcam image is, JOIN THE CLUB. I’ve been through the code… I don’t know how many times. The Flash layout system hates me.

I’m sure that part of the problem is my ghetto open source development tools for Flash. But until I have $700 to sink into something that is mostly a hobby, this is what I have available.

And to everyone about to tell me to pirate it: eat me.

i hate actionscript

Michael Barton — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 11:24:35 +0000

I needed to make a Flash movie containing pictures that could be dragged out onto the surrounding HTML elements. And it almost worked, too.

You can pass information from Flash to HTML by sending the browser to a javascript: URL, so the idea was to trap the mouse-down event in Flash, then pass a message to the javascript telling it that it’s currently in a dragging state. Replicate the dragging graphic in both Flash and HTML, and you can almost imagine this method working.

Except… if you try to drag something outside of Flash, it refuses to give the mouse events back. Flash continues receiving events though, so you could theoretically pass those back to the browser yourself. But calling getURL(’javascript:…’) to share the current mouse position causes IE to “click!” for every pixel the mouse moves.

I’m not really a Flash guy, so this may be possible via some other chicanery. But based on currently available data, I’m going to call it a defeat.

Mike: 0, Flash: 1

WeirdLooking.com: Michael Barton's Blog

actionscript still sucks

i hate actionscript