I’ve had this problem with the text input controls in Flash for awhile, particularly in Yahoo Maps & Messenger, where while highlighting text with the mouse and selecting an index point and dragging the mouse to highlight text, if you release the mouse button outside of the browser, Flash does not get a event notification that the mouse has been released. This causes a few nasty issues, especially if you start typing again- the text gets deleted because its been highlighted. Related to this, when copying/pasting/select all, the keyboard commands don’t work unless you hold the keys down for an extended amount of time.
I first heard about the keyboard commands behaving like this from the web messenger team at Yahoo!, which is built in Flex 2, and I know that the text input focus bugs exist on Yahoo! Maps, which is built on the archaic Flex 1.5.

I’ve placed an example here to demonstrate the bugs. Be sure there is ample space on the screen to the left of the browser window, so you can release the mouse outside- then without moving the mouse, try typing again. Next, move the mouse back over the text field (somewhere around the middle), and type again. If you type past your mouse position, that text will become highlighted, because Flash still thinks the mouse button is down. Then, try the keyboard commands to copy/paste and
select-all.

Now, what makes this interesting is that these issues do not exist in the new Safari 3 on Mac.

http://zachgraves.com/flash/textinput/TextInputBugs.html

I’ve finally decided to get back to blogging over here again (at least a little bit)

The majority of my old posts were pretty lame and over a year old (like anyone actually read them), so I’ve cleared them out and starting fresh.
Anyways…

My name is Zach Graves, and I’m a product design developer at Yahoo! under the entertainment properties. I was previously with the Maps team at Yahoo!, and was involved quite a bit with the Flash APIs and the main consumer site as well and worked with some great people there.

Update: Soon.