<script>
_root._quality = “Best”;
</script>

We just this week discovered an anomaly, where the Flash Player will default to lower-quality rendering in certain situations. This condition is triggered in OpenLaszlo if you include a splash screen in your application. We’ll be blogging or writing about this soon, but in the mean time you can try the following workaround to see if it makes a difference. Simply add the following code to your application, either within a canvas or a library tag.

_root._quality = “BEST”;

You are probably right that our font embedding story is a bit more complex than that available through Adobe’s Flash IDE. But I’m skeptical about the claim that image rendering is inferior, since we just pass raster image data directly to the Flash runtime. Of course, it’s possible there’s still a difference — perhaps we don’t turn on a feature on the Flash8 runtime that the Flash IDE does — but if so we’d love to see a screenshot and sample code so that we can narrow down the problem. (Please contact me directly, jgrandy at openlaszlo dot org, if you can provide more information.)

As for drop shadows and so on, I believe there are OpenLaszlo developers who have used motion blur and other Flash 8 effects within OpenLaszlo apps, so I know it is possible. We haven’t integrated effects into public OL APIs, though, so doing so requires dropping into ActionScript (not a big deal, but not well documented either). But we’re open source, and would welcome anyone who would like to help make this feature happen sooner rather than later.

Thanks again.

Particularly for mockup purposes, there are also some issues around fonts: at least for a Mac user, the process of embedding any available font in a Flex app is relatively straightforward if you have Flash Pro. Doing it in OpenLaszlo is more complex and not something I’ve managed to do yet except with an existing ttf file.

I’ll also be excited to be able to take advantage of the Flash 8+ filters like Drop Shadow from OL.

I’d wait a few more months — the high-level UI widgets aren’t yet available in DHTML.

Can you expand on what limitations you see in OL3.x for raster image rendering?

Is this prerelease complete enough to use for this purpose, or should I be waiting a few more months?

sean

Here is how I remember the derivation of the project name “legals” (since several have asked in other places): Jim and the west coast members of the OpenLaszlo team had come to Cambridge, MA to meet with the east-coast members of the team for a 1-day architectural status meeting.

In the morning, the decision before us was whether to put efforts into supporting Flash 9 or DHTML. There were strong opinions on both sides. We took a break for lunch, at the Legal Seafoods Restaruant near Harvard Square. The lunch, originally budgeted for 1 hour, ended up taking 3 hours, and during that time the decision was made: “What the hell. Let’s do both.”

Jim Grandy suggested the project name “legals” in honor of the luncheon at which this decision was made.

Other participants at the lunch that day may remember things slightly differently.