Matthew P. Thomas: "Half a second before he clicked, I realized what he was doing, but I regret to say I was struck immobile by horror and disbelief."

I've had this happen to me multiple times usually while using my Flash editor. If you unfocus the browser window while using the editor then refocus the window, the editor will lose focus and you'll have to click within the editor to regain focus. If however you hit the backspace key because you still see the flashing cursor within the editor your browswer will back up a page and lose your changes upon returning as the editor was not really focused. This is probably a bug that might be fixable within the confines of the current Flash player but it illustrates that it would help to retain a documents state upon an unexpected exit of the page.

An addition I'll make to the editor's wanted feature list is frequent saving most likely to a local session variable that will re-populate the lost document if it hasn't been posted but was lost.

Ideally it would be best to create the document then have it continually saving thus removing the idea of the "Save" button altogether. Also inspired in part by mpt's When good interfaces go crufty.

A small update, but feature changes nonetheless to bump up the point number a notch. A few bugs with regards to importing and exporting were added and a variable exportNativeText and JavaScript method exportNativeText() were added for those that want the native Flash HTML instead of the CSS version.

Flash Editor 1.2.1 is now up. A bug in the export routine that caused sibling nodes to inherit their previous sibling's properties has been fixed.

Also, please email me if you are experiencing problem highlighting text. I've had a few reports mentioning this problem and I need to fix it. It's most likely caused by the need to update the toolbar and explicitly having to place the cursor selection back into the textfield after the update. If anyone has a suggestion for a better algorithm please let me know. Stuart Schoneveld's editor doesn't seem to be affected by this problem but since he hasn't released the source I can't determine how he's accomplished this.

I'm also trying to find some time to add comments to my weblog so that people can discuss in a forum rather than simply emailing me.

Version 1.2 of my Flash Text Editor is available. Numerous additions have been made including backend support for browsers that don't support JavaScript communication with Flash and a totally redone export routine. I'll be the first to admit that the import and export code is getting out of hand and is not a great example of my typical work. Hopefully over the next two versions I'll be able to produce something much more readable. Flash is totally pass by value so my parsing needs to get a bit more creative.

Some may notice the text selection to be a bit wonky. I'm still wrestling with Flash to get the interface behaviour down pat. If anyone can discern a better algorithm please let me know. I've had a few suggestions and submissions but each implementation had certain flaws that I wasn't happy with. This version has the best behaviour yet and I will continue to try and improve it.

Please play with it and let me know if something is amuck. If you have a solution to the issues listed by all means, fire it off to me.

A special thanks on this one to Anthony Hunt who provided assistance and example code for backend communications.

I've updated the Flash Text Editor. New features include font conversion to CSS inline style, CSS style importing, font name importing, and a new colour picker. Backend loading and saving for Macintosh usage is coming very soon. Check it out and let me know what you think.