Flash: Using mouse wheel events in full screen mode (Windows and Mac)

Question

Although Flash has a mouse wheel event (MouseEvent.MOUSE_WHEEL), it comes with quite a few problems.

The first is that the event is not yet supported on the Mac. So there are a bunch of solutions, all of which (basically) capture the mousewheel (or DOMMouseScroll) event in javascript and pass it into the flash app. Luckily, under all the Mac browsers I tested, this also works when flash is in fullscreen mode.

Problem 2 is that flash ignores mouse wheel events with small "deltas". For example, Microsoft's IntelliPoint Mice with "Smooth Scroll" causes this problem. A solution to this is the same as the solution for the mac... i.e. capture the javascript mouse wheel event in the browser and pass it to the app. The issue is that of the browsers in windows that I tested (firefox, ie, safari, and chrome), they don't seem to capture this event when flash is in full screen mode. Does anyone know why or how to fix that?

I currently have a hybrid solution that always takes events from javascript (in non-fullscreen or fullscreen mode) except when it's in fullscreen mode on Windows (at which point it takes them from the flash mousewheel event). So the only times it fails is in full screen mode on Windows with a mouse that has small deltas. Anyone have a full solution? Or just a better one?

Answer 1

Your solution is one of the best. Only one is better - don't use mouse wheel :(

Adobe should do something with it (and with support for other controllers).

Answer 2

MouseEvent.MOUSE_WHEEL seems to work fine on mac since Gala beta and 10.1 final. i can trigger mouse wheel events using the magic mouse and track pad in both Safari and Chrome.

Answer 3

Pixelbreaker's MacMouseWheel has given me successful fullscreen scrolling on a mac, but I haven't used it in a while (on Safari 5 for example).

The downside is that it captures events for the whole page, so you will lose scrolling for the HTML even if the flash element is only a little box on the screen.

But you could basically switch between what you've built already, and what he's using in the macmousewheel.js when you've enabled full screen.

Hope that helps, good luck.

Answer 4

It's a know issue on adobe's JIRA. You need to wait'em to fix it, or use another event instead MouseEvent.MOUSE_WHEEL. It's not working on windows because the flash player implementation is completly different in windows from mac and linux. Mac and Linux uses GTK to implement the plugin Handle. On windows it uses a Win32API Common HWND, which steal focus on full screen mode, causing the non dispatching of scroll events on the browser. On Mac and Linux, GTK just stretch the plugin size into desktop's size, and don't do a real fullscreen. It's a GTK behavior inside these systems. Nothing can be done.