Update: Adobe has added the Loader.unloadAndStop method to Flash player 10 to address some of the issues outlined in this article. You can find more details on this feature in my article “Additional Information on Loader.unloadAndStop“.

Flash Player 9 has a very dirty secret. It doesn’t even try hide this dirty secret, but it’s still not that widely known. You see, Flash Player has severe problems with separation anxiety – once it’s loaded some content, it has a really hard time ever letting it go. Technically speaking, it is extremely difficult to make Flash Player 9 unload ActionScript 3 content.

In this article, I’ll take an in-depth look at the issue, it’s implications, suggestions for addressing the problem in the player, and some workarounds for the time being. If this issue seems like it will impact your projects, I’d strongly encourage you to read through the article and educate yourself, then use the link at the end of the article to provide Adobe with feedback on it. Likewise, I would encourage you to share this issue with other developers, both to help spread awareness of the issue, and to give them the opportunity to also provide feedback to the Flash Player team. I see this as one of the most critical issues that should be solved in Flash Player 10, and the more people raise it as an issue with Adobe, the more likely it is to be addressed.

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Here’s some quick code to parse individual tags and text elements out of an html string. It might be handy for some people, but it’s also a good example of some advanced RegExp. Note that you could also do this by parsing it to XML, and traversing with E4X.
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The CS3 component architecture makes use of TextFormats for all the text-styling needs. This decision was (likely) made to simplify the API, but still allow full control over the formatting of the text.

Natively, there is zero support for CSS styling, in fact, setting a styleSheet on the textField of a component (all components expose their textField instances) results in a run-time error, since TextFormats can not be set on textFields with a styleSheet.

But fear not! Not only are the components easy to extend, but it is not at all difficult to add CSS support to any component. In this example, I have added a styleSheet component style to a TextArea, which plays nicely with the built-in TextFormat. Rather than just posting the source code, I have broken down how the implementation works to provide some insight on how the components work, and how this sort of approach can be applied to any component, for almost any task.

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A lot of my experiments utilize a *lot* of randomness. This is great because it produces very organic looking results, and often leads to unexpected emergent patterns or behaviours that are more interesting than the intended system.

The downside of this is that if I get a particularly beautiful output from an experiment I have no way of capturing or reproducing it besides taking a screenshot. I can’t easily reproduce it because the Flash Player’s Math.random() function is not seeded, meaning there is no way to get the same series of numbers from it again. Thus, every time I run the experiment I get a completely unique result.

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