Problem:
You publish your SWF from the Flash CS3 IDE and everything looks fine. You, or someone else checks out the SWF in a browser and although everything kind of works, certain elements like text fields and component buttons aren’t rendering properly!
Solution:
Sometimes certain revisions of the Flash 9 player behave differently than expected, but there is a way you can look into it. Read on…
I actually just tried to recreate this, and I can’t. All I know, is that on two particular occasions while working on moderate sized flash projects certain revisions of the flash player would fail to render some things properly (but not every time). This kind of thing is very frustrating, and if you think it might be happening to you, this is what I suggest:
- Go here: http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_14266 and download the Flash Player 9 archive file (I had this problem with FP9).
- Go here: http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html and download the Flash uninstaller.
- Uninstall Flash, install a different revision, and test your movie (in the browser). In my case, revision 47 caused this problem, and sure enough anyone testing the movie that saw this problem had revision 47. I haven’t been able to recreate this error by creating a new flash movie using components and viewing it with flash player rev 47, but there must have been some combination of things that the particular revision didn’t like.
- If you find a revision that’s giving you problems, make sure to check for a more current one in your flash embed code.
This is a screenshot of the unzipped folder containing all the different versions of Flash 9. The ones ending in “win” would be for Firefox and Netscape, and the ones ending in “winax” are for IE (ActiveX). There’s some linux and mac ones in there too. I believe “SA” stands for standalone. Play around.
