Allow smoothing for Bitmaps
Just a quick note since I’ve not seen anyone blogging about this, but Flash 8 does miracles to pictures when scaling (well, compared to Flash 7 anyhow). Remember that "Allow smoothing"-check-box when opening the properties of a imported picture which really did not do much to increase quality? Well in Flash 8 it does. If you set _quality to "high" or "best", bitmaps with the "Allow smoothing"-property set are now really smooth when scaling and/or rotating. Bitmap edges are now even anti-aliased with the background.
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The new smoothing functionality is fantastic – BUT! It doesn’t work when you load in an image because you can’t set the “Allow smoothing” property in ActionScript. This is a MAJOR flaw.
Future versions of applications like flickr.com if they decide to use Flash Player 8 will get pixelated (aliased) images because there’s no way to smooth them.
I’ve mentioned this on Tinic Uro’s blog as well, hopefully we can get a fix for this soon… http://www.kaourantin.net/2005/08/fixing-one-bug-at-time-in-flash-player.html
In order to get loaded in images to have smoothing turned on you’ll need to use the BitmapData class, but it is rather annoying to have to do this (unless I’m missing something).
You can also safe the image in a separate swf that has the same size as the image. In that swf turn allow smoothing on and then load the swf instead of the image. Works fine, it’s just much more work…
If you really needed the image to be resized when flash gets it, couldn’t you just write a quick PHP script to download new images, resize/scale/smooth them, and feed them to your flash app?
This is assuming you have a server somewhere with PHP support and some PHP experience, but what self respecting flash developer doesn’t have both of those things. With the wealth of tutorials on PHP on the internet and all the free/cheap server space available, this should be easy to setup for firs timers.
Do like Einstein said. Don’t try to solve problems, try to avoid them.