Finally! Correct Bitmap Support in Flash

Hear ye hear ye! One of Macromedia Flash's oldest, most annoying bugs has finally been fixed -- correct rendering of imported bitmap images.

For years, Flash developers have been forced to jump through a series of unnecessary, annoying, time-sucking steps to get around a Flash player bug which mangled any image without whitespace around its perimeter. If your image was tightly cropped to the nearest whole pixel (like all web designers instinctively do) and imported into Flash, when published the edges of the image would blur and appear slightly distorted. If your image was bitmap typography, the effects were even more pronounced.

To get around the bug, designers were forced into adding at least 2 pixels of transparent space around the image to fool the Flash player into keeping the edges sharp. Not a big deal if you're only working with a few images, but if your project included an html component, each and every bitmap used in html would have to be re-edited and exported - either by hand or with an Action - in Photoshop. Not exactly an optimal workflow environment.

To make matters worse, the real edge of your imported image (when placed inside a movie clip or graphic) would then sit at x:2, y:2 -- making pixel-perfect placement (either by hand or through ActionScript) a pain because you had to factor in the extra 2 pixels of empty margin. Ugh.

After testing a series of images and bitmap typography, the bug would appear to finally be fixed.