**Note: this appears to be repaired in the latest release of the player – thanks to everyone who helped get the word out and tested!

Yesterday I was testing some Flash content after installing Firefox 3. I noticed that some of my movie clips which had events assigned to them were not acting like buttons. I also noticed that if I went above the normal hit area of the button that I could catch a pixel or two of the button. I thought that I had screwed something up in my code or layer structure somewhere along the line.

Later in the day a friend asked me if I had been experiencing any problems with Firefox 3 and Flash. “YES!” I said. Basically I have confirmed a bug which exists, at least on a Mac, involving Firefox 3 and Flash Player 10b. I looked up the bug in Bugzilla and there are some semi-related items (from old builds). I have documented this in a screen record which you can view here:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

For the record here are my system specs:
Mac Pro with Leopard (10.5.3)
Flash Player 10b
Firefox 3

• This was confirmed on a MacBook Pro with the same.
• We checked a MacBook with Leopard and Flash Player 9 and the problem did not exist.
• It did not exist on my machine under FF2 and FP10.
• PC with XP, FF3 and FP10 the bug was not present.

If anyone has additional insight into this that would be great! Looks like it is mainly a Flash Player 10b issue though red flags were raised based on the previous bug related to Flash and Firefox 3.

I just finished writing an article for The Tech Labs.  The article steps you through the creation of a class that simulates the flip of a business card.  Lots of you have downloaded and commented on my previous CardFlip class written in AS2 so go check out the AS3/Flash 10 version!  The class will give you a bit of insight on the usage of the new rotationY property as well a basic usage of the PerspectiveProjection class.  You will of course need to have the beta version of Flash Player 10 installed to see the code in action.  You can view the results of the class here (Flash Player 10 required):

Flipping a Bitmap – Click on the card to flip


Flipping an SWF – Edit the text and click the Flip button to flip the card

You can view the article/tutorial on The Tech Labs site.

I was stoked to find out that my Snow Class was used on the latest episode of LAYERS TV.  LAYERS TV is the video podcast counterpart to LAYERS magazine, a great publication for all things Adobe.  I found it interesting that the tutorial follows very much the same workflow I used when I originally presented this at the Pittsburgh Flash Users Group.  This tutorial uses AfterEffects for some great visual text and then uses the Snow class on top of that to achieve a great effect with a small file size.  I took a snippet of the video that shows the technique and workflow and posted it below:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

You can subscribe to the LAYERS TV podcast here.  You can also subscribe to the magazine online.  If  you are interested in giving the Snow class itself a go then you can download that here in AS2 or AS3 versions.  Thanks for the shout out Rafael!