Tech Blog

In my previous post I thought that swfobject was causing the wmode=transparent problem in IE. However, I was wrong. Folkert told me that swfobject only passes the parameter to the Flash Player, swfobject is only the messenger.

Instead of wmode=transparent I also tried wmode=opaque as Jorrit suggested, but it didn’t make a difference. I set up three wmode sample pages to test the issue:

• regular
• transparent
• opaque

When you’re viewing the transparent and the opaque page in Internet Explorer you can see that editing the walls is quite difficult. You can also see that panning the design results in a strange elastic movement. I hope to find a solution soon….

Update
I’ve been reading this post and it looks like it’s something we have to live with…

SWFs using wmode actually perform slightly different from SWFs that have a default wmode. The difference is that when you are running as transparent or opaque, events are delayed until an onEnterFrame. If you are running at a slow frame rate and drive your movie with setInterval or use any number of other events, you are back to your slow frame rate. The real kicker is that SWFs in IE have this bug. SWFs in Firefox are just fine.

Last week we accidentally introduced a nasty bug into the Floorplanner Flash app. Well, actually it wasn’t the Flash app that caused the problem. It appeared to be a weird issue in swfobject.

We wanted to layer some html content over the Flash app, so we added this line to the JavaScript:

swfObject.addParam( "wmode", "transparent" );

By doing that, the Flash app started acting really strange in Internet Explorer (6&7). I removed the line today and all seems fine again…

I found this great tutorial on how to install Apache2 and PHP5 on OSX.

Thanks a lot Maccius!

By the way, if you just want to use the Apache and PHP versions that come with OSX, read this post.