Comments on: Flash FocusManager Hell http://crueltown.com/wordpress/?p=36 Don't like it? Start a thread about it. Sun, 16 May 2010 16:15:11 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: Marlin http://crueltown.com/wordpress/?p=36&cpage=1#comment-4 Marlin Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 #comment-4 Well said. I’ve been working on a forms based application and have run into various problems that have taken far longer to solve than similar issues in other environments — including this one on the focus manager. Your comments are helpful, but the suggestions aren’t working in my case, perhaps because of different behavior when using a popup window and/or an accordion widget.

My application has taken MUCH longer to build than expected, and while some of that is due to my learning curve on Flash, there have been many issues of this ilk where the documentation was insufficient, or was just wrong. Very unlikely that I’ll use Flash again, and I expect to migrate features out of Flash as this application evolves.

Re: your comment, “I’m assuming that if you place a tie, the z-order is the tie-breaker.” That would be an intelligent, reasoned behavior, wouldn’t it? So I think we can figure that’s not the way its done in Flash.

]]> By: Central Scrutinizer http://crueltown.com/wordpress/?p=36&cpage=1#comment-5 Central Scrutinizer Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 #comment-5 While misery does love company, it pains me to imagine you or anyone else suffering through the Flash forms application implementation. I finally got mine to a working state, but I cringe each time I look at my bug list and see an item that is going to force me to delve back into the Flash code. I was an early adopter of Java, but drifted away long about version 1.1. I went with Flash for this project because I needed a highly graphical GUI widget on a web page, and I thought that building it with Flash would be faster than using Java. What I discovered is that Flash is only an appropriate choice if you are running weeks ahead of schedule and are dangerously close to finishing early. Otherwise, you can expect it to add weeks to your development timeline.

I have not tried to use the accordion widget, so I cannot offer any advice on how to work with it. I can assure you that I will not be using it, or any other unfamiliar Flash widgets, in the future either. The next widget I need to build I’m going to dust off my Java hat and put it back on. Flash is absolutely ridiculous.

]]>