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Last weekend, my girlfriend and me went to Wandlitz for a short trip. Wandlitz is a small town close to Berlin and has two lakes around it, namely “Wandlitzer See” and “Liepnitzsee”.

We decided to hike around the “Wandlitzer See” the first day, which was pretty nice at the beginning, where there was a promenade. But after 1km, the promenade turned into a normal road and started to drift away from the waterside, which is not exactly what I imagined of a hiking tour around a lake would look like. Anyway, I found a quite interesting sign next to an intersection after walking around half the lake lying on the ground, most probably knocked over by some car, saying “Watch out for children!”. I hope the children are still doing well unlike the sign…

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As my new community project is using a lot of Javascript and Flash Communication, I rely on Flash’s ExternalInterface. ExternalInterface allows me to create simple functions in Flash, which are callable from Javascript. I developed everything using Firefox, where everything worked just fine, but when using Internet Explorer, I encountered the problem that no ExternalInterface functions would register, breaking the Flash/Javascript Communication completely.

After endless hours of testing, I found out that for ExternalInterface to work in IE, 2 conditions have to be met.

1. The Flash needs to visible. Loading a flash into a hidden div does not work.
2. It has to be loaded before the document onload event. All Flash files loaded after the onload event can’t register any functions with ExternalInterface.

There seems to be an issue with transparent PNGs (with alpha channel) in IE 7, too. I had some ugly black background in the pictures even though other PNGs worked just fine. The reason was that it the div was hidden first. I guess IE 7 has some serious issues with invisible divs.