Sucks when you seem to have a bug in your code somewhere so you dissect your code over and over and are convinced that according to your code, everything should be fine, so you come back later thinking fresher eyes will see it, and still can’t find the cause, and then resort to debugging with various trace statements…
I’ve been developing a custom flash player in as3. Fullscreen and all those bells and whistles… I could test locally and eveything was beautiful… but then upload and test in the browser and when I would go into fullscreen mode, the video would pause. Pretty annoying bug! So I’d go through my code and examine anywhere a call to pause the video (there are only two): pressing the play/pause button and pressing the spacebar (keyboard shortcut). I couldn’t find any correalation. I was thinking adobe must be doing some crazy security things when going into fullscreen… but no, no other video player I’ve seen does this!
After commenting out my keyboard events, the bug is fixed! But I still can’t use the spacebar to pause/play. I love this functionality for usability. Isn’t that pretty standard for video? space to pause, it’s like second nature to me.
Does entering fullscreen really trigger a keyboard event equivalent to pressing my spacebar!? Sure enough. how much sense does that make, but it gets better! I had a friend test this swf and it worked fine for him. No pause on fullscreen! Wha!? Using good ole IE7… So yes, it’s a browser specific actionscript bug, firefox even! That was one of the things I liked about flash initially, not too much to mess with as far as cross browser issues once you get the swf embedded in the html, or so I thought.
So after playing with booleans to try to control when the keyboard events will be working.
Has anyone experienced this or another issue that just left you baffled, even after you figured out the bug?!
Well, I’ve done the right thing, I’ve posted about it to hopefully help anyone else having this issue. I created a test case file to rule out anything else in my code and make sure I’m not crazy.
[kml_flashembed fversion=”9.0.0″ movie=”https://circlecube.com/circlecube/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2009/03/fullscreen_keyboardevent_bug.swf” targetclass=”flashmovie” bgcolor=”#336666″ publishmethod=”dynamic” width=”550″ height=”400″ allowfullscreen=”true”]
[/kml_flashembed]
[cc lang=”actionscript”]
stage.scaleMode = StageScaleMode.NO_SCALE;
stage.align = StageAlign.TOP_LEFT;
fsb.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, fullscreenToggle);
ssb.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, fullscreenToggle);
stage.addEventListener(FullScreenEvent.FULL_SCREEN, onFullscreenChange);
fsb.buttonMode = true;
ssb.buttonMode = true;
onFullscreenChange();
function fullscreenToggle(e:MouseEvent = null):void {
//normal mode, enter fullscreen mode
if (stage.displayState == StageDisplayState.NORMAL){
//set stage display state
stage.displayState = StageDisplayState.FULL_SCREEN;
}
//fullscreen mode, enter normal mode
else if (stage.displayState == StageDisplayState.FULL_SCREEN){
//set stage display state
stage.displayState = StageDisplayState.NORMAL;
}
onFullscreenChange();
}
function onFullscreenChange(e:FullScreenEvent = null):void {
if (stage.displayState == StageDisplayState.FULL_SCREEN) {
tracer(“full screen”);
fsb.visible = false;
ssb.visible = true;
}
else {
tracer(“small screen”);
fsb.visible = true;
ssb.visible = false;
}
tracer(“toggle to “+stage.displayState);
}
stage.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN,keyDownListener);
function keyDownListener(e:KeyboardEvent) {
tracer(“keyboard: keyCode: “+ e.keyCode.toString());
}
var tracerwindow:TextField;
function tracer( …args){
if (tracerwindow == null){
tracerwindow = new TextField();
tracerwindow.width = stage.stageWidth/2;
tracerwindow.height = stage.stageHeight;
tracerwindow.multiline = true;
addChild(tracerwindow);
}
for (var i:uint = 0; i < args.length; i++) {
tracerwindow.appendText(args[i].toString() + " ");
}
tracerwindow.appendText("\n");
trace(args);
}
[/cc]other places that I've found this mentioned that helped me understand what was going on:
http://dreamweaverforum.info/actionscript-3/123202-keyboard-event-full-screen.html
http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-814
I just realized that I hadn’t updated the site about it, but I’m now (since a couple months) interactive designer/developer with Redworks, subsidiary or Ogilvy & Mather in Atlanta! I’ll be doing all kinds of interactive designing and programming, specifically with flash and I’m stoked to be waist deep in Flash and as3 daily.
Also I was able to use automator to create a context menu item – although I prefer the droplet since I don’t have to fool with the accuracy required to navigate through nested context menu items. I’m still yet to create a shortcut that will make it the fastest, but this is a big step in the right direction. It’s one thing I love about computers, and I guess life in general, where there’s a will there’s usually a way (especially when forums are involved). Figured I’d post this for posterity and in case any of you are wishing your mac could do this too.
