Development tidbits, struggles, revelations, and still some Flash

A buddy of mine IM’d me last night and came across an interesting behaviour in Flash. He had been trying to hunt down a memory leak in his Flash AS3 project and did a simple test using an Enter_Frame loop and traced out System.totalMemory.   His tests showed totalMemory going up just a little over time. I tested it on my side and even testing it in Flex and got the same behaviour.  It’s very small, but I was curious why this was happening.

Here is the very simple sample code in Flash CS3 (you could repeat it in Flex as well):

[code]

 addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, repeater);

function repeater(evt:Event) {
 trace("System memory:"+System.totalMemory);
}

[/code]

I have tried unsuccessfully in ActionScript 3 to open a new window within my Flash app using navigateToURL w/o triggering the Firefox pop-up blocker. This is a desired action by the user, triggered by MouseEvent.CLICK, allowScriptAccess=true,  and based on Firefox’s dom.popup_allowed_events, it should work w/o being blocked. I’ve googled other possibilities (http://skovalyov.blogspot.com/2007/01/how-to-prevent-pop-up-blocking-in.html) but haven’t found a single option that appears to work correctly for me.   The other detail of this is that the HTML is loading the SWF and all the content from another domain, which works perfectly. Its just that Firefox is giving me fits.

Anyone got any better ideas?

UPDATE August 29, 2008 :

I came across this URL and the method proposed here worked perfectly for me.

http://www.zorked.com/flash/flash-and-navigatetourl-popup-blocking/

Engadget had sneak peeks this morning and then Nokia updated their site recently: http://www.nseries.com/index.html#l=products,n810,demo

I’ve been thinking about the Nokia N800 as a fun Flash development device. The 810 now has GPS, a full QWERTY keyboard (slides out from behind), and they are now using a Mozilla based browser. (I think they were using Opera before). Once the N810 pops up on Amazon, I’m going to have a tough time saying “no”. I’ll have to hand-me-down my PSP and Garmin GPS to someone else in my family.

FITC Hollywood  starts next week (Oct 22-23) and it should be a blast. I attended last year and expect more of the same this year.  Sunday (Oct 21) is the pre-festival workshops (Flash animation, PV3D, and Flash New Features). I highly recommend John Grden’s PV3D workshop. I took his two day workshop at RMI and if you are interested in real 3d in Flash, this is the class you want to take.  Â

See everyone there.Â

I’m looking for a new toy to develop Flash for.   Ideally what I’d like is the iPhone, but with Flash on it. Since that hasn’t happened and not sure it will happen, I’m looking for either a phone or mobile device (device needs wireless) that has a touch screen, can run Flash (either Flash Lite or Flash player), and can run Flash full screen SWFs directly from the phone/device without having to navigate with a browser.  Â

Can someone make a recommendation or two?  I’ve seen the LG Prada phone, but I’m unsure if you can develop for it w/o a browser.  I’ve also looked over the Nokia N800 series devices.  Thanks in advance.