Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category

Flash: Pre-Loading Issues

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

I recently ran into a perplexing issue. I had used my standard pre‐loading code in AS3 (using .bytesTotal) in
a media loading project. All of the sudden, IE (of course) stopped loading a value into the .bytesTotal. My loader was
returning NaN. It still completed its ‘loaded’ actions, but wouldn’t track the active loading. Then I tested it
in Chrome & Safari, and it was happening there too! Firefox was fine however. Now I was really confused. This had never been an issue before, but at work we recently moved to a new server solution. So I did a bit of research…

Apparently, I’m not alone. The issue seeming stems from files being served up with GZIP compression
before being sent to the Flash Player. We had the server solution turn off GZIP compression & Voila! It
worked.

Hope this helps someone, like it did me!

Dev : IE Cookie Issues

Monday, November 9th, 2009

 Just ran into an interesting issue in browser issue in storing cookies. Apparently, the standards‐compliant way to code a cookie is “max‐age”. But, on testing in IE (any version, any recent OS), the cookie will be active (not write however) for the current session, but once the browser is closed, then re‐opened, all the current cookies will be gone.

Upon further investigation, the cookie tag “max‐age” does not work in IE. The old tag “expires” must be used instead. This works in all current browsers. Hope this helps someone!

Correct!
document.cookie="value=test;expires="+expDate+";path=/";

Incorrect
document.cookie="value=test;max-age="+expDate+";path=/";

Flash : Best Tweening Engine

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

There are quite a few tweening engines out there, but I haven’t found any as useful, speedy or efficient as TweenLite (~3k), and its more robust brother TweenMax (~8k). I’ve been using this one for about 3 months solidly over a year now & have no complaints.

If you haven’t decided on a tweening engine for yourself yet, check it out here.