The method to use in the Loader class is the close() function. And the BIG problem in this is that when I tried in the flash ide the loader didn’t stop the stream… I tried everything… cleared every event listener, but in the flash “bandwidth profiler” I could see that the swf where still loading… so when I clicked at the navigation buttons as a maniac the “bandwidth profiler” showed me a bunch of loading swf simultaneously.  After a lot of tryes end error I found out the the only problem is the falsh ide and the “bandwidth profiler”. If I do the same on a web server the connection cuts of the I get a sweet “Client closed connection before receiving entire response”. So much headache for nothing…
Thank god for Charels! The best debugging tool ever! if you don’t got it, go and get it here»!

What I did was adding this line in the crossdimain.xml file and the error went away!
<allow-http-request-headers-from domain=”*” headers=”*”/>

So here is the complete crossdomain file:
<cross-domain-policy>
<allow-http-request-headers-from domain=”*” headers=”*”/>
 <allow-access-from domain=”*” />
</cross-domain-policy>

If you are usingSocket connection in flash the problem is not this easy to fix. Read this article about the new socket security rules:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/socket_policy_files.html

Here you can read about the new security rules for flash player 9,0,124,0
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/flash_player9_security_update.html

Turn on/off scale “To stage”: ctrl+alt+8

Horizontal align: ctr+alt+(1-3)

Vertical align: ctr+alt+(4-6)

And another feature in the align toolbar is “Match size” wich I never used until recently. Useful when resize a background-shape to stage size.

And the shortcuts for that with “To Stage” on:

 ctrl+alt+shift+7 –> ctrl+alt+shift+9

http://potapenko.com/eng/extensions.htm

To get around crossdomain issues I placed a shell-swf on a remote server that in turn loads the main-swf. Have done it like that a thousand times before but this time I just couldn’t get it to work.

It turns out that i tried to set stage.scaleMode in the main.swf which of course isn’t allowed to write that property. Only the shell has that privelige.  So the swf just failed silently and it took wuite some time to figure out the problem.

Before you start, make sure you have the permission to use javascript on the sites. Sometimes you can sneak in your javascript in the embed-code generated by the media agencies, the siteowner does’nt even have to know about it. But sometimes, when you need to fire some code on the onInit-event, you have to get access to the document header. However, with some workarounds you don’t really need that. In the following example you can put the script after the swfobject-embedding.

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Javascript source:

Okey, we gonna follow the mouse, so here we go…

Begin by adding the onmousemove-event. This event is firing quite fast, so you don’t want to send data to the flash every time. Instead I pull the data from inside the flash via ExternalInterface.call().

The key to follow the mouse is to know where the banners top-left-position is. There aint no crossbrowser-property for this, so you recursive checks the positions via offsetTop and offsetLeft to the parent element. See getBannerPos-function. I noticed that firefox added the same offsetHeight twice for the embed-tag and the parentElement. This row fixed the problem:

if( flashMovie.offsetParent ) flashMovie = flashMovie.offsetParent

It’s a safe fix, because the offset to the object/embed-parent is zero in all other cases. We only need to check the position once. So we keep checking until we get a result. The onmousemove-event may be fired many times before the position can be measured. So while bannerX/bannerY is 0, keep checking. Be careful with Explorer, if we check the position to soon, we can get the left position before the top position is available (especially with floating css-divs), so wait for both parameters to be non-zero. Put the “getBannerPos()” in the method called from flash, and your home safe.

Next thing is to get the scroll position. Because this changes over time, I do that every time onmousemove fires. To get the scrollposition is a little more tricky due to all browsers different implemention, I just used a script I found at google.

So now we got the four variables with what we needed. MouseX, mouseY, bannerX, bannerY. Time for flash to do some magic.

actionscript source:

In order to have a smooth gap when rolling over and out the banner you have to setup a mouse-listener here as well. Otherwise, it will get jumpy or not working at all. Some browsers don’t fire mousemove-events when over a flash. There is a known problem to register a mouse leave from the stage. I checks if the mouseX and mouseY changes. If not, wait a few frames and then assume we don’t have the users attention anymore. This can certainly be made better by checking mouse position in javascript, but this worked good enough this time. So, when the flash mouse-position stops, we will listen to the javascript-position.

What to do with the knowledge of mouseposition is up to you. In my example I render a paralax-effect based on the values.

Flashcontent

Here is the recepy:

Create these filters:

var filter1 = new flash.filters.DropShadowFilter();
filter1.angle = 90;
filter1.distance = 1;
filter1.blurX = 0;
filter1.blurY = 0;
filter1.color = 0xf3d22f
filter1.strength = 1;

var filter2 = new flash.filters.DropShadowFilter();
filter2.angle = 90;
filter2.distance = 2;
filter2.blurX = 10;
filter2.blurY = 10;
filter2.color = 0×000000
filter2.strength = 0.5;

var bevelFilter = new BevelFilter(2,90,0xfedc74,10,0×929292,10,2,2,0.42);

Add “filter1″ 12 times or what you prefer (myMC.filters[filter1,filter1,...]).
Add a regular drop shadow ( “filter2″) at the end.

In this example a have added a beveleffect (”bevelFilter”) to each slice. To get the correct z-rendering of  the blue slice I scripted a mask, based on the angle of that slice.

 The downside is the lack of antialiasing on the edges.