SWF Studio 3.4 has been released!

3.4 was in beta for a while and has now been officially released. This new version fixes the big issues people had with V3, including the MSVCR80.dll issues. And of course the big one is full Vista support. 3.4 runs on all Vista flavours and has Vista icon support, as well as the ability to include a manifest file so you can work with Vista’s UAC feature.

A quick run-down of the new features:

• run SWF Studio IDE/applications on all versions of Windows Vista
• increased stability
• support for Vista icons
• full Unicode support in plugins
• .NET plugin support and SDK - write plugins with C# and VB.NET
• includes Flash Player 9
• more … (release notes)

You may have noticed that although Flash Player 9 is included in your 3.4 applications, AS3 support is not mentioned. AS3 support is coming in a future version of SWF Studio. In order to increase stability and get proper Vista support a core technology was modified. We felt it would be too much of a change to have that modification AND AS3 support in one release. We wanted to release a MORE stable product, not chase after features at the expense of stability. 3.4 was in beta for a while and we feel as though we’ve released a solid product.

AS3 support isn’t that far away since most of the work was already done - we just put the remaining work on hiatus until 3.4 was tested and released. Another beta will start in the coming weeks with AS3 support. The AS3 beta will be closed so send your registration info to beta at northcode.com if you want in on it.

There’s a new look to the site. The home page gets to the point and the info on the other pages is broken up better so you can find everything a lot easier. It’s still a work in progress. We’ve talked about focusing on certain features every <insert time frame here> for new users and users that just haven’t used that feature yet. As well as a blog that will let us discuss SWF Studio and other related matters. Stay tuned …

Try it out, then come back to this site and click on the link near the top-right: Buy SWF Studio for 10% off!

I know a lot of people have moved on to Flex 2 and Flash CS3 but there are many people that are still forced to use Flash 8 and earlier due to a variety of circumstances. I am one such individual.

In developing an app for a client I found an issue with V2 List and Tree that I had seen before but never really bothered with. Previously this issue was simply an annoyance. But in this current app the lnf needs to have a solid 1 pixel border around instances of the List and the Tree components.

The issue is a 1 pixel “extra” space between the left border and list items. No matter what you set the borderStyle to be the extra pixel is always there. This becomes very obvious when setting the borderStyle to none or solid and hovering over an item.
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In AS2 you probably typed your for loop index variable as Number. In AS3 I thought it would be better to use uint. I always start the index from 0, or some positive number and increment from there, like:
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While most people are probably building Flex projects, there are some of us who build AS-only projects as well. While looking for resources on AS3 I came across Joey Lott’s ActionScript 3 Cookbook. Near the beginning of the book there is a section labelled “Customizing the Properties of an Application”. That caught my attention and I came across the SWF metadata tag.

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I am VERY pleased to present my son, Ian! Born at 10:15am on October 20th, 2006. Ian was born 9 pounds 4 ounces!

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