Flash text boxes being outlined unintentionally

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I have a flash animation being used on the homepage of one of my websites that has a few text boxes that rotate/fade in and out of each other. For the longest time, when I publish this movie to the web, the text box has been showing up with a faint line at the top and bottom; sort of a lighter colored line than the actual background color. I tried all sorts of things to get rid of it including moving the box to different locations, resizing the box, changing colors, embedding text…..anything I could think of!

Well today I finally stumbled across the answer to the problem and it appears to be a bug in Flash. If the text box is set to "Anti-alias for readability" the problem appears, but if it is set to "Anti-alias for animation" it goes away. Go figure. Since the two do not seem to change the way the text looks at all, it works just fine as the latter.

iPod Video G5 Hold Switch not holding

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I noticed a few weeks ago that when I pulled my iPod out of my pocket, it was lit up as though it were being used, even though the hold switch was in the hold position. I sort of assumed that the hold switch itself was broken. But whenever I tried testing the stupid thing outside of my pocket, the hold switch worked just fine.

After a while, I realized that the real issue was not only completely unexpected, but completely bizzar as well. The hold stops working when you press on the screen! It’s like some kind of bizarre-o-world touch screen "feature" of sorts: As long as the hold switch is on, the scroll wheel doesn’t do a thing, but if the hold switch is on and I press on the screen then I can do whatever I want with the scroll wheel. LAME!! What’s the point of the hold button?

Is anyone else experiencing this? I can’t find it documented anywhere else, probably because just about any search with the word "ipod" in it gives innumerable results. I’ve had this G5 Video iPod for a little over a year and the symptoms started about 2 months ago.

Flash hangs while loading standard profiles

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Whenever I try to load Macromedia Flash lately it takes for EVER to load. You know how the splash screen gives updated text as to what is currently loading? Mine is hanging on loading standard profiles. Anyone out there know what might be causing such a disturbance in the force? A google search tells me nothing.

Mac OS X hidden files: why???

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Why does Mac OS X create a hidden file for every file that is saved?

I tried searching for an answer to this question on Google, but unfortunately I got a bunch of results about how to view hidden files in Mac OS X.

I’m no Mac expert and maybe some Mac enthusiast can convince me otherwise. But isn’t it absolutely absurd to create a hidden file for every file saved on a Mac? Specifically, I’m talking about the stuff I’m seeing in our Samba shared drive here in the office. Anything saved to that shared drive from a mac, also puts a hidden file with essentially the same name as the original file, but with a dot-underscore (._) before it. And of course, since I’m on Windows this becomes very annoying because if I remove the real file, the hidden file is left behind and after a lot of usage these hidden—seemingly useless—files pile up. Where’s The Fire??

I assume it has something to do with file association, but isn’t Apple smarter than that? Is there a way to turn this off?

Using SWFObject for Flash Version Tracking

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At my company, we use Omniture SiteCatalyst for our web analytics/tracking. Unfortunately, Omniture does not give user’s Flash Version statistics in their standard reports like Google Analytics does. On the other hand, Omniture gives you the freedom to create custom reports that you can determine on your own using their provided JavaScript code.

I am already using SWFObject to load the flash piece on our homepage to users with a specified version. So I figured I could hack that code a bit in order to pull the version it was already determining for me, and plug it into the Omniture code.

After mulling through the SWFObject code, I finally was able to run this page successfully, which will alert the exact version of flash I am using:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>test</title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="swfobject.js"></script>
</head><body>
<script type="text/javascript">
alert(deconcept.SWFObjectUtil.getPlayerVersion().major+
"."+deconcept.SWFObjectUtil.getPlayerVersion().minor+
"."+deconcept.SWFObjectUtil.getPlayerVersion().rev);
</script>
</body>
</html>

Basically, you can use deconcept.SWFObjectUtil.getPlayerVersion().major to get the major version, etc.

Once I got that working, I was able to use that same concept to plug it into my tracking code.