No-database Flash-PHP chat. Part V: Emoticons

This is the final article of the No-database Flash-PHP chat series (see Part I, Creating Basic Chat Functionality, Part II Security and Usability features, Part III Security and Usability features (continued) and Part IV, Usability and nice-to-have features)

In this last iteration we will concentrate on a topic that is definitely more fun than security or user tracking. Today we will talk about “Emoticons” or how they also call them “Smileys”. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary an emoticon is “a group of keyboard characters (as :-)) typically representing a facial expression or an emotion or otherwise conveying tone or attitude that is used especially in computerized communications (as e-mail)”.  We could add to that instead of “a group of keyboard characters” it could be an image, or in case with Flash … animation (yummy!).

There is a good and bad news. The good news is you CAN make really cool looking Flash emoticons with sound, video and all the effects Flash has in its arsenal. The bad news is Flash seems to be having troubles with positioning movie clip within a TextField or TextArea component inline with the text.  The only workaround I found was to display emoticons on the next line. If this doesn’t bother you – proceed to the next paragraph, otherwise I would suggest waiting for the next version of Flash player. Hopefully this bug will be fixed.