Posted on Sunday 19 June 2005
Here's a fun little bug for today: if you have components on stage, don't try to use _root.getNextHighestDepth()... There is a movie clip called 'reserved' on level 1048575 and _root.getNextHighestDepth() will yield 1048576. But level 1048576 is part of the special levels that can't be properly unloaded and live in limbo in the player... meaning you will encounter weird bugs such as combo boxes not opening up.
Here is another fun way to break combo boxes. Create a new movie. Insert a combo box. Insert dummy labels and data (make these different from each other). Insert the following code on the main timeline:
Object.prototype.anyNameWhatsoever = function(){};
Ctrl+Enter. Combo box looks like it works. Click the arrow and select an entry. Whoops, the combo box labels suddenly disappears. Click the arrow again, and bam! all the list items have the same label. Clicking again will randomly select all entries.
I'm guessing this has something to do with dataProvider prototyping Array and __resolve...
There was a blog that popped up featuring a frustrated guy documenting bugs in the player and in the components etc. Now some people (including JD I believe) have said well these bugs are small annoyances and this guy is not shaking up Flash development, he's just whining, learn to appreciate Flash, Macromedia has a great community around its products, blablabla. I say it's damn well time that the Flash player bugs (even annoyances) are publicly documented. Those two last bugs and the last couple of textfield-related bugs I've mentionned made me lose at a FULL DAY OF WORK, which at my rate is about a third of the cost of the license of Studio MX 2004; it's not just an annoyance, it's a question of TIME and BIG MONEY. Sure, once you know about it, it takes 2 seconds to solve, but where am I supposed to find out about the bugs? The known workarounds? In the end the private bug form is not doing anyone a favor. I say that setting up some kind of moderated BugZilla where well-respected developers (ie not kiddies that annoy everyone) can document bugs out in the open would push MM to solve the issues and give everyone a centralized place to find workarounds in the meantime.
