In AS3:
Error #2044: Unhandled IOErrorEvent:. text=Error #2036: Load Never Completed.

In AS2:
Nothing shows up on the stage, and the stage becomes black.

If you did, we got a solution for you, and also the problem. The solution is to get rid of the bitmap you imported last time (try to delete them one by one until you get to the right one, if you do not remember), before Flash started act strange. The problem is that the bitmap is corrupted!

We had our good time of stress to figure out what’s the problem on the last project we’ve been working on. It’s really hard to find and we had to break the project piece by piece. We hope this will take the headache of your shoulders!

The bug also makes the movieclips dissapear from the stage, even if the layers are not hidden, and you will see an empty stage.

Sometimes, on resizing the browser window, the elements are showing up strange on the screen too, like in the images below:

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We thought it would be better to give this hint to our customers before the questions start coming.

Flash Player 10 distorts sounds sampled higher than 44KHz when using the loadSound function within AS2 – which is the version of ActionScript we used to create our file.

The solution is simple, encode your files to a value lower than 44KHz. You can read more about this issue here:

http://www.blackcj.com/blog/2009/01/30/flash-player-10-48khz-sound-playback-bug/

Hope this additional info helps in case you found yourself having issues with your sound files and the Flash Mp3 Player.

I thought I should cover this issue on this article, as we’ve had a lot of clients who happened to write back complaining of missing text. To start with, you should know – the client is the issue, not the missing text. :)

Before you decide to write me back and argue on that, please give me a chance to explain myself.

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If you ever need to use HTML text read from XML to present it in a flash content you need to respect the following:

1. The html text needs to be nested in a CDATA tag inside the XML file like this:

<item><![CDATA[ Dummy text <br>
Dummy text <br> ]]></item>

2. The textfield that is going to be used to show the text needs to have the property html set to “true” and write the text in the htmlText property like this:

textField.html = true;

textField.htmlText = “text”;

3. The most important: if you are programming in AS2 it is mandatory to read the text from the XML tag using “firstChild.nodeValue” like this:

var htmlTextFromXML : String = node.firstChild.nodeValue;  // the read text will be “Dummy text <br> Dummy text <br>”

If you use only “firstChild“, the html tags will be interpreted and their special characters like “<” will be converted:

var htmlTextFromXML : String = node.childNodes[i].firstChild;  // the read text will be “Dummy text &lt;br&gt; Dummy text &lt;br&gt; ”

I hope this hint will help you to use much better the XML files in Flash developping.

You can download the source files for this tutorial from here.

In this tutorial I’ll show you the best practices for using PIXEL fonts in Flash. We decided to start with this tutorial because we see a lot of Flash work on the web which doesn’t look as crisp and clean as it could look.

The most frequent issue we found was the wrong usage of pixel fonts, which caused the text to look blurry and be unreadable.

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