I am sure this is old news to many of you, but today was the first time I have run into this issue. I am working on a site for a client that has very high accessibility requirements. I originally built my project to be controlled using the mouse and was asked this morning to add the ability to navigate it using the arrow keys of the keyboard. It only took me a couple minutes to get this functionality working in Flash, but when I tested it using Firefox I was not getting any response from the keyboard. I tried it out in IE7 and everything worked like a charm. After a couple minutes of searching I came across this site and found my solution. Apparently Firefox always returns the Key.isDown() function as false if you have wmode=”transparent” or wmode=”opaque” in your html object and embed tags, but if you use Key.getCode() everything works perfect.
Here is a snippet of code showing the workaround to this issue:
Read more…
The end of the long anticipated wait for Adobe Creative Suite 3 is almost here. I got my first glimpse of the goodness to come in Las Vegas at Adobe MAX 2006. I expect the differences between Adobe and Macromedia products will finally come to an end as the best of both worlds are merged into one. Of course I’m mainly interested in Flash CS3. I never managed to make it onto the beta testing list and the Flash 9 alpha was Flash 8 with ActionScript 3 support, which was fun to play around with, but boasted no new interface enhancements and other goodies. Friends who did make it onto the beta have told me about some of the new features and I’m pretty stoked to try them out for myself.
The official announcement from the Adobe Creative Solutions PR team.
http://blogs.adobe.com/creativesolutionspr/
Fraser 
Earlier today I received a news letter from ActionScript.org. This threw me off for a second because the only emails I get from them are job postings. The email template was well done and mimics their new site redesign, which is quite nice compared to their old outdated design. If you have already forgotten what it looked like, you can kind of make it out here using the Wayback Machine.
I am currently in the process of reading the excerpt from Tom Muck’s Flash Remoting: The Definitive Guide. This excerpt is part of a new partnership between ActionScript.org and O’Reilly. It seems like a good deal for both sides. I am sure this will drive a lot more traffic to ActionScript.org and inevitably lead to more book sales for O’Reilly. So far the first few pages of the excerpt have been very well written and quite informative.
While reading the article I have realized that I will have to change my job title. Now that Flex has been released I am no longer a Flash Developer, but instead, a Client-Side ActionScript Programmer. I think that this is a much more dynamic sounding title, but it will take some getting used to after referring to myself as a Flash Developer for so long.
I am quite excited about the freshened up ActionScript.org site and enjoy having the ability to preview books before investing in them. Of course O’Reilly is one of my favorite publishers, so this is good news to me.
I have finally got around to learning Flex 2. I did play with it a bit when the Flex Builder 2 beta was released awhile back, but with the lack of good documentation at the time I decided I would wait for the full release. While writing the blog reader tutorial in the Flex builder help files, which connects to Matt Chotin’s blog, I came across a link to a very cool site called The Flex Online Compiler built by Ben Forta, Ted Patrick, and Ray Camden. It allows you to type MXML and ActionScript code right into the page and have the server compile it into a SWF below. This is a great way to see what Flex can do without having to install any programs onto your computer.
http://try.flex.org/index.cfm