Flex and Full Screen considerations
Posted by admin on October 22nd, 2008
Today I was trying to create a Flex application, that when loaded by the browser will go on full screen. After a few tentatives (that didn’t work of course) I searched the help and found this page about
Programming ActionScript 3.0 > Flash Player APIs > Flash Player Security > Full-screen mode security.
I will highlight the main features here:
- The ActionScript that initiates full-screen mode can be called only in response to a mouse event or keyboard event. If it is called in other situations, Flash Player throws an exception. In other words: bye bye full screen at startup
- Users cannot enter text in text input fields while in full-screen mode. All keyboard input and keyboard-related ActionScript is disabled while in full-screen mode, with the exception of the keyboard shortcuts (such as pressing the Esc key) that return the application to normal mode. This is not cool…Not at all, but I understand. Consider a page that renders a full screen flex window showing a standard Windows log in screen. How many will think that something weird has happened to Windows once again and enter the login credentials into the malicious window 
- Full-screen mode is always permitted in the stand-alone player or in a projector file. OK, but who cares? I wanted to do full screen in THE BROWSER.