All Flex developers, please do this.
Posted March 6, 2009 
Comments(12)
Comments(12) Even if you aren’t a Mac user, please do this to your Flex apps.
Even if you aren’t the kind of person who uses the scroll wheel on your mouse or two-finger scroll on your trackpad, please do it.
If you do, you will make some of your users very very happy.
Is there a reason you prefer the pixelbreaker solution to this one:
http://hasseg.org/blog/?p=138
I’ve tried both, and they both seem to do the trick. Haven’t had a chance to look into the code to determine which one is implemented better though.
No, no preference. I only just learned about this today, and didn’t know there was more than one solution out there.
Mike,
You’re absolutely spot on. But being part of Adobe, is there really nothing you guys could do to end this embarassment of not having mouse wheel support on Mac on a supposedly cross-platform plugin? *irony*
Well, I’ve dealt with this many times myself and I have adapted a solution from Japan that comes without JavaScript:
http://code.google.com/p/open-zoom/source/browse/trunk/src/main/flash/org/openzoom/flash/utils/ExternalMouseWheel.as?r=177
Cheers,
Daniel
P.S. Seriously, please check with the player team if there’s something we could do about this. It’s a real pain.
I’ve talked to the player team in the past about this issue; they aware of it, it’s on their radar. If you want to turn the radar blip into a huge torpedo that they can’t avoid, you can vote here: http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-503
I had a look at (and voted for) the bug entry you linked to above, but have some thoughts on the entry itself:
I feel it’s misleading, and dilutes the issue. Firstly, the title has the word Flex in it. Secondly, it’s complaining about mousewheel support in Safari on Windows XP! Perhaps that is why it currently only has 10 votes.
The actual issue is that the mousewheel doesn’t work in any version of the Flash Player on OSX. It’s just a side-effect that it affects Safari on Windows.
This is a HUGE issue – Flash is all about Rich GUI these days, and OSX users are still without proper mouse support! How could this be an issue with only 10 votes?
Perhaps a more appropriate bug entry is needed?
Shawn, you’re right that the bug is misleading in mentioning Flex and in being Windows-specific. I’ve modified the bug.
Awesome, thanks Mike :)
Can you explain what does it solve? Maybe you should talk to great Adobe to fix the issue and not ask developers to do more job?
I totally agree with that and was already doing that for all my recent developments.
@Daniel Gasienica: I need to have a look at your solution. If it doesn’t use Javascript that’s exactly the solution I was looking for.
Grover, I should have used a different tone in my post, to make it clear that I am aware that the real bug here is an Adobe bug and that it’s our responsibility to fix it, but that in the meantime, until we can get this fixed, there is a workaround that Flex developers can take advantage of if they want to. Sorry — I can understand how the tone of the original post may have bugged you.
Thanks for the link to both the fix and issue. Voted because this definitely needs to get fixed sooner rather than later.
Yeah. I wish this bug was fixed. As it is I’ve taken one of the solutions out there and decoupled it from swfobject, added in the fixes in the comments and made it a drop in patch (1 line of mxml) for Flex applications. http://www.judahfrangipane.com/blog/?p=237
The repository has the latest version with a bug fix and being that it’s in a public repository anyone can add patches to it (no one will).