We received a slightly puzzling bug report for our charting components today. The user changed the export frame for classes in his movie to 2 in order to allow for a preloader on frame 1. As soon as he did this, the components stopped working.

He was very diligent in his report and provided examples and steps to reproduce the problem. I followed his steps and immediately saw the same problem he was reporting–the components no longer worked. Without immediately realizing what was wrong, I went as far as creating SWFs in with classes exported on frame 1, the default, and on frame 2 and compared the SWFs with ASV and saw that the differences were really minor.

But there was one important difference that was a problem–the components were being exported before the classes were available. Both the user and I had forgotten to uncheck Export in First Frame for the components. So of course they didn’t work. Uncheck that option and put them on the stage after the classes frame, and everything works fine.

As it turns out, the Flash MX 2004 Help on this issue is very clear. It provides steps for setting the export frame for classes and then explains the ramifications for doing that and that you have to uncheck Export in First Frame for components. Guess I need to rtfm more often….

We’d like to take a survey to see what open-source Flash projects exist. Can people involved in open-source projects post a comment here or e-mail us? Information we need is the URL, whether it has anonymous (read-only) CVS access, approximately how large the project is (number of lines) and approximately how many different packages it contains.

We want to make sure open-source projects can take advantage of BLDoc to meet their documentation needs.

This has been a long time coming, BLDoc 1.0 beta is now available to the public. It has gone through a long alpha period and thanks to excellent feedback from testers we are happy to make it available today.
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