ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook: Chapter 3, Runtime Environment
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

The following class demonstrates the effects of both the scale mode and alignment of a movie within the player. Experiment by changing the stage.scaleMode and stage.align properties to their different values and scaling the browser to various sizes.

package {
  import flash.display.Sprite;
  import flash.display.StageScaleMode;
  import flash.display.StageAlign;

  public class ExampleApplication extends Sprite {
    public function ExampleApplication( ) {

      stage.scaleMode = StageScaleMode.NO_SCALE;
      stage.align = StageAlign.TOP_RIGHT;
      
      graphics.beginFill(0xff0000);
      graphics.drawRect(0, 0, stage.stageWidth, stage.stageHeight);
      graphics.endFill( );
    }
  }
}

Section 3.8: Hiding the Flash Player's Menu Items

Problem

You want to hide the right-click menu under Windows (Control-click on the Mac).

Solution

You can't disable the Flash Player's pop-up menu entirely, but you can minimize the options shown in the menu by setting the stage.showDefaultContextMenu property to false.

Discussion

By default, the following options appear in the Flash Player's pop-up menu when the user right-clicks in Windows (or Control-clicks on the Mac):

• Zoom In

• Zoom Out

• Show All

• Quality (Low, Medium, or High)

• Settings

• Print

• Show Redraw Regions (if using a debug player)

• Debugger (if using a debug player)

• About Adobe Flash Player 9

This excerpt is from ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook. Well before Ajax and Windows Presentation Foundation, Macromedia Flash provided the first method for building "rich" web pages. Now, Adobe is making Flash a full-fledged development environment, and learning ActionScript 3.0 is key. That's a challenge for even the most experienced Flash developer. This Cookbook offers more than 300 solutions to solve a wide range of coding dilemmas, so you can learn to work with the new version right away.

You can remove many of the options with the following line of ActionScript code, although the Settings and About and debug player options remain in place:

stage.showDefaultContextMenu = false;

Unfortunately, Flash does not provide any way to disable the menu entirely. Furthermore, Windows users are accustomed to using right-click to display a pop-up browser menu that allows them to open a link in a new window, for example. Such options are not available due to the Flash pop-up menu's presence.

See Also

See Recipe 3.11 for a way to display Flash's Settings dialog box without requiring the user to right-click (in Windows) or Control-click (on Mac).

Section 3.9: Detecting the Device's Audio Capabilities

Problem

You want to determine the audio capabilities of the device on which the Flash Player is running.

Solution

Use the hasAudio and hasMP3 properties of the flash.system.Capabilities class.

Discussion

The flash.system.Capabilities.hasAudio property returns true if the user's system has audio capabilities and false otherwise. This is extremely important for playing movies on multiple devices. If a device has no audio support, you want to avoid forcing users to download something they cannot hear (especially because audio can be quite large).

// Load a .swf containing sound only if the Player can play audio
if (flash.system.Capabilities.hasAudio) {
  content = "sound.swf";
} else {
  content = "silent.swf";
}
// code to load the .swf referenced in content

Just because a system has audio capabilities, however, does not necessarily mean that it can play back MP3 sounds. Therefore, if publishing MP3 content, you should test for MP3 capabilities using the flash.system.Capabilities.hasMP3 property. MP3 sounds are preferable, if supported, because they offer better sound quality to file size ratios than ADCP sounds.

// If the Player can play MP3s, load an MP3 using a Sound object. 
// Otherwise, load a .swf containing ADCP sound into a nested 
// sprite.
if (flash.system.Capabilities.hasMP3) {
  var url:URLRequest = new URLRequest("sound.mp3");
  sound = new Sound(url);
  sound.play( );
} else {
  // code to load an external .swf containing a ADCP sound
}

It is important to understand that the hasAudio and hasMP3 property settings are based on the capabilities of the Player and not of the system on which the Player is running. The desktop system players (for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux) always return true for both properties regardless of whether or not the system actually has the hardware (i.e., soundcard and speakers) to play back sounds. However, players for other devices may return false if the device does not support the audio or MP3 features.