Also known as a Non Selectable Transparent Textfield With Embedded Font :).

Some of the V2 Flash Components are less than intuitive now and then. While working on the new trophy tour for Heineken we had to create an application with a transparent textarea with non selectable non editable text using a non standard (embedded) font with Spanish characters (amongst others) ( in Flash 8 ). Oh yeah and the text had to be rendered smoothy using advanced anti-aliasing.

This leaves you with different options. Although I was tempted to simply use a standard textfield, this should be easy to implement using a TextArea component as well, right? Sure. As an easy reference for our own and your convenience, here is a step by step approach.

Creating the test movie

1. create a new flash movie, size it 300 x 300, and choose a background other than white
2. drag a TextArea on stage, name it ‘ta_test’ and enter some text for the text parameter in the parameter section
3. compile the movie, you’ll see a textarea with a border, a white background, whose text is editable and selectable

ActionScript 2, timeline scripting or parameter settings?

You’ll have to decide if you want to approach this using the parameter settings, timeline code or actionscript 2 code. In some cases you can choose, and in some I found timeline code was the easy/only option. This can probably be fixed by waiting a few frames after instantiating the TextArea, but this sounds like a nice exercise for some other time. Let’s keep it simple for now and use whatever works for demonstration purposes.

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The funny thing with ‘professional’ software is the weird things you run into. Everytime. When you don’t need it. At 1 A.M.
This time around Outlook started whining about objects not found. It didn’t say which object which is kind of an easy way out. I can just see ourselves running around “Couldn’t find an object, couldn’t find an object”. Go figure.

Solutions on the microsoft site led to nowhere. They proposed creating a new profile, migrating all your mail, settings, rules etc to the new profile. I think not! The problem was easily created (really, I didn’t even had to do anything !) it should be easily fixable.

Luckily after googling for an hour or so I found this one:

Outlook 2003 The operation failed. An object could not be found error

“Answer: Close outlook, simply delete all the *srs files from %userprofile%\application data\Microsoft\Outlook.
EG C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\outlook.srs

When outlook is re-opened it will create a new *.srs file (* = the name of your profile in outlook)”

Yeah baby, simplicity rocks!

Also known as:

If you work with V2 components in Flash, this tip will surely help you out some day: when using V2 Components such as a Combobox, you may find your buttons no longer work correctly. Overall, this manifests itself by not being able to click more than once on a button. Before you can once again click on the button, you must first move the mouse again. Especially with navigation buttons, on which you are usually click-click-click-click-click-ing, this is less than optimal.

This is appearently caused by some components which are not playing nice with a component’s focus. The fix is relatively simple and disturbing at the same time:

In the onPress handler of such a button, you must include the following:

Selection.setFocus (this);

A focus rectangle now appears on every button, and to remove that, you use the following:

this._focusrect = false;

It is also possible to apply this to all buttons at once:

Button.prototype.onPress = function () (
this._focusrect = false;
Selection.setFocus (this);
)

This will not be an option in most cases however, unless you rigidly commit yourself to overriding only a button’s onRelease handler.

I started working on a new painting this week, and this time it’s an elephant painting. This thread posts the sketch and a few steps to the end result (at the bottom!).

Basic sketch

Dark background

First step in color process

Second step in color process

Done !

(Click image for larger version)