Papervision 3D hand cursor

viewport:Viewport3D's property buttonMode is what control if a hand cursor should show on ALL or NON 3D objects. If buttonMode=true the hand cursor will show whether or not the materials are interactive, or if you are listening for InteractiveScene3DEvents.

So if you need hand cursor to show all time, set viewport.buttonMode=true; and if you do not want a hand cursor anytime, set viewport.buttonMode=false;

If you need to show a hand cursor on specific target objects, you should set viewport.buttonMode=false; and then have each target object to set listeners. In those callback functions you must use CursorManager.setCursor(id:Class) | CursorManager.remove...

Font Embed

I want to share my experience with working with Flex and font embedding. Today I noticed that an embedded asset including a symbol with text that embedded the same Font as the Flex compiler did - It seemed to result in a conflict of what scope (or sandbox?) the font should belong to.

1) Flex can embed fonts from a flash-8.swf by the @font-face {} tag.
2) Flex can embed fonts in an instantiated AS3 model to a Class type using the meta Embed tag.
3) Flex can also embed or dynamically load an asset.swf that includes embedded fonts, and then have those exposed to any scope (or sandbox?) that wish to register them. And the other way around - the loaded asset.swf may register the fonts embedded by Flex.

Later I will show how. I haven't yet figured out the reason for the above mentioned problem, but let me start by sharing a simple workaround. In this case the asset.swf had some symbols in library with non-dynamic textfields in it. They where imported or pasted into Flash from an Illustrator design. When embedding/loading these symbols, all other text in the applications other scopes did not render. The solution to this was simply to redo the import from Illustrator to Flash first after I made the Illustrator textfields to outlines.

Maintain thumbsize in a scrollbarcomponent.

I found a great tutorial how to set a constant thumbsize in a scrollbarcomponent.

http://npacemo.com/wordpress/2008/05/20/flex-3-designer-scrollbar-fixed-size-scrollthumb/

Problem removing blankspaces with split(" ").join("");

Yesterday I was playing around with Adobe Air and flex. My goal was to parse a productprice from an HTML-site by splitting the pricetag in to ”kronor” and ”oren” (pounds and cents) My only problem was that ”kronor” below 10 just contained one number, before that number was a blankspace to balance the textalign on the site.

So I built a function that was suppose to remove the blankspaces with split(” ”).join(””); , but no success. After some testing I tryed the string.charCodeAt(index:Number = 0);. This function returns a “charCode” , the numeric Unicode character code of the character ,at a specified index, this gave the result 160. After some googleing on unicode 160 I found this site http://bytes.com/forum/post1462660-5.html. This sort of blankspace-characters are called a ”non breaking space” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-breaking_space. I also found that there are some more types of whitespace - characters that may be used by unicode but not removed by the split(” ”).join(””) – function. So to solve this problem I some how had to force the special character in to the splitjoin-function. After some reading about strings on ”livedocs” ,http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/String.html ,I found the String.fromCharCode(), that simply translates a list of commaseparated Unicodenumbers to a string. So instead of using split(“ “).join(“”) to remove the non breaking space I used split(String.fromCharCode(160)).join("").