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I've just posted a new ActionScript function for AS3: isFrontFacing(). This function lets you determine what side of a movie clip or other display object is visible and currently facing the user. In other words, is the display object flipped, or not? This method works for both 2D and Flash Player 10's 3D transformations on display objects. This can be particularly useful if you want an object to display different graphics when looking at its reversed or back side.

Something to keep an eye out for if you use audio files with a sampling higher than 44Khz: songs with higher than 44KHz sampling rate playback incorrectly (FP-862). This is a Flash Player 10 bug that affects older content. More specifically, if you use (AS2) Sound.loadSound() with an audio file that has a sampling rate higher than 44KHz, the playback of that audio will be garbled.

The simple solution: change your audio to use a sampling rate of 44Khz instead. Keep an eye on the bug for any changes in status for the issue.

If you didn't already know, there is a public Adobe bug base for logging and tracking bugs (and feature requests) for Flash Player. Before I tell you where you can find it, I want to lay down some important guidelines you should follow when logging a bug.

After every Flash Player release (namely new versions of the player, not so much dot-releases) I enter a depression. This depression is brought on by the fact that no matter how confident I am about a certain release, there are always problems with it. The worst cases are when existing content breaks as a result of a new player version. And as much as I'd like to say that isn't the case with Flash Player 10, I can't.

As Emmy Huang points out, version numbers for Flash Player 10 have changed. Basically, we're now using all of the 4 identifier values in the Flash Player version string. Before, Flash Player basically used the scheme major,0,build,0. Now, the scheme is major,minor,maintenance,build. This means that for "dot releases" of Flash Player, the minor build can be incremented to give us something like 10.1 and 10.2 etc. (Finally!) Though, granted, there are a lot more numbers to look at now. At least the new format is completely backwards compatible so it you only look at the first and third values, you'll still be able to distinguish between player versions.

Chances are by now, you've probably heard of LittleBigPlanet. If not, a week or two ago, I would have been surprised. But given that most of the people I talked to at work about it haven't heard about it, I'm starting to think it's not as well known as I had once suspected. But maybe now that's changed with the latest news regarding its release.

At the top! Yes, well, maybe you *put* them closer to the bottom, but Flash still declares them at the top of the function. Confused? Lets take a look at some examples.

This is something I had meant to post for a while now, but didn't, and after FlashCamp this past weekend, I regret having waited since I know a lot of people had problems with this...

I don't know about you (and I know a lot of people are different), but every time I create a motion tween in Flash, I have a specific workflow. That workflow is, creating a symbol, adding a keyframe in the timeline at the end point of the tween (using F6), modifying the symbol at that location, then right-clicking in the generated span and selection "Create Motion Tween". Tah-dah! a motion tween! Of course now, whenever I do that in CS4, the end result is a stagnant timeline that screams "You fail at life!"