Val Head is totally into design, type, code, coffee & the internet.

I ran into an interesting bug today when trying to figure out why on earth a button in our final files suddenly stopped working. In fact it was more like suddenly non-functional and only half the graphics were visible. Not cool for a button.

After a little investigating I track it down to Flash Optimizer. Apparently it does not play nice with blend modes and this button had a layer who’s blend mode was set to overlay.

Looking into it a little more I found that it’s this bug wasn’t tied to any particular optimization setting at all. Just having the file run through Flash Optimizer — even with all optimizing options unchecked– was enough to break this button that was using a blend mode.

So, moral of the story – blend modes and Flash Optimizer don’t play nice together. If you need to use optimize,r avoid blend modes.

To see the incompatibility in action, check out the SWFs below:
The button with no blend mode used
The button with blend modes

If you’re wondering this was found on Eltima Flash Optimizer version 1.48 build 1.4.8.175

If you’ve been following the Flash blogs/aggregators I’m sure you’ve seen the posts cropping up that say that the Flash IDE is dead or the posts segmenting the industry into Flex developers and Flash designers.

If you’re like me, the ideas in those posts don’t sit to well with you.  Anyone who does both design and development has probably started to wonder whether Adobe has them in mind at all when developing future versions of Flash.

I was really happy to see that Adobe is paying attention.  In response to an open letter to Adobe,  Lee Brimelow has gone so far as to ask the community for help improving the Flash code editor.  I’d encourage anyone who still uses the Flash IDE to code to add their two cents.  (If you’re curious, here is the letter, and here is Lee’s first post responding to that letter)

Will this mean that all will be solved in CS4?  Probably not.  As Lee mentioned in this post making changes to the Flash IDE editor will not be easy for the development team.  Hopefully, though  a big response to Lee’s request will convince the development team that it’s worth it to make some of these changes.