this is portable

First off, I need to say that this is not meant to be a blog all about bugs. It’s just been that kind of week! (I’ve also just been picked up by mxna so, I feel the need to point that out.)

Now, about the Dreamweaver CS3 crashing…

What was happening:
Dreamweaver suddenly quit on me mid-editing a handful of times. After three times, I couldn’t get the app to start up again. All I got was the start up screen for a few seconds and then, nothing. Restart my machine… still nothing.

What fixed it:
After a lot of frustration and re-installing and grumbling, a very helpful co-worked found this link . I had a CSS file in the last defined site I was working on who’s file size was exactly 8K. That was what was stopping the app from even launching.

Opening the CSS file in question and adding a comment line to bump the file size up to 9K fixed it all.

If you’re into all the details:
Dreamweaver CS3 running on a PC with XP
Windows logged the following error: Faulting application dreamweaver.exe, version 9.0.0.3481, faulting module msvcr80.dll, version 8.0.50727.762, fault address 0×000144d8.

I ran into an interesting bug today when trying to figure out why on earth a button in our final files suddenly stopped working. In fact it was more like suddenly non-functional and only half the graphics were visible. Not cool for a button.

After a little investigating I track it down to Flash Optimizer. Apparently it does not play nice with blend modes and this button had a layer who’s blend mode was set to overlay.

Looking into it a little more I found that it’s this bug wasn’t tied to any particular optimization setting at all. Just having the file run through Flash Optimizer — even with all optimizing options unchecked– was enough to break this button that was using a blend mode.

So, moral of the story - blend modes and Flash Optimizer don’t play nice together. If you need to use optimize,r avoid blend modes.

To see the incompatibility in action, check out the SWFs below:
The button with no blend mode used
The button with blend modes

If you’re wondering this was found on Eltima Flash Optimizer version 1.48 build 1.4.8.175