Recently charged with implementing a Flash component called 3D Wall Pro from Flashloaded, I quickly ran into a snag of sorts. A bug if you will. It came up because of the particular way the images needed to be laid out, according to the designer’s specifications. The designer wished to have the images displayed with minimal gap between the thumbnails. On a click, the image zooms up and the eight neighboring images still have an edge inside the view space (Figure 1). The thinking is that you can then navigate one image over at a time if need be instead of clicking the full image to zoom out then click.
Figure 1
The problem with the aforementioned scenario is that while I could click and navigate to the images on the right, left and the bottom three; I couldn’t click any of the top images. Frustrating to say the least. It appeared to be a bug to me, but I checked and double-checked all the parameters for the component. Everything seemed to be the way it should and nothing accounted for the 32 pixels of dead space.
To me, the number 32 seemed to stand out. That number is so perfect for a toolbar height or something similar. The number 32 is such a programmer’s number. Why 32 pixels of dead area?
Well, I put my noodle to work looking over all the component parameters once more and was drawn to the video settings section. On a whim I set videoControls to false. I wasn’t worried about this since videoControlsAutoHide was set to true and I didn’t have any videos anyway. To wrap this up quickly, the 32 pixels were, indeed, the video controls. Setting the videoControls setting to false cured my problems.
