Unlikely Teacher

I’ve had one of the weirdest problems last week when a friend reported that our newly designed navigation menu created in Flex was not working on her MacBook.

Basically, I had a couple of moving Flex Canvas’s where I attached mouse click events.

private function homeClicked(evt:MouseEvent):void {
   getURL('/');
}

private function updatesClicked(evt:MouseEvent):void {
   getURL('/category/updates');
}

private function storiesClicked(evt:MouseEvent):void {
   getURL('/category/stories');
}

private function galleryClicked(evt:MouseEvent):void {
   getURL('/category/gallery');
}

private function getURL(url:String):void {
   var request:URLRequest;
   request = new URLRequest(url);
   navigateToURL((request), "_self");
}

We had no problems running this on IE, Firefox and Safari on Windows and Firefox on Ubuntu Linux so we got a little worried why it was not working properly on a Mac.

I initially thought that a popup blocker was probably causing the problem with navigateToURL() so I tried exploring changing the AllowScriptAccess parameter to “always” and use Flash/Flex’s support for calling ExternalInterface.

The animated Canvas’s also had rollover and rollout effects but they worked fine on all the mentioned platforms including Mac. So the problem must be with the Mac Flash Player not getting the mouse click events.

After several days of searching we discovered that the div where I placed our Flash object had a negative z-index declaration on its stylesheet which was getting in the way of Mac OS X’s Flash Player ability to receive mouse clicks.

I simply removed the z-index value and we finally got the links to work on those lovely little MacBooks.

Anyway, thanks to all my friends and their MacBooks for helping me with this very tricky problem.

Now we’re off to exploring PaperVision3D…