Things go wrong at the right time

You know how it goes, everything is working fine before the presentation, and things start to fall apart during the show…

Sho Kuwamoto of Macromedia was demonstrating how easy it is to build an application in Flex Builder 2 yesterday at MAX, and things started to fall apart, but ended up fine.

Something similar happened to me recently at the Flash in TO gathering, when I was showing Flash Lite mobile development. By the way, I started using Flash 8 many months ago, it has never crashed on me, not even the early alphas.

At the gathering before my presentation, I set up all the applications, files and folders – everything’s ready to go. When it was my turn, I plugged my laptop into the projector and it detected a resolution change, my desktop was resized automatically, and I began the presentation.

When I brought Flash 8 to the front, because of the workspace was originally set for 1920×1200 and it’s now much smaller, things needed to be adjusted within the IDE. To my surprise, dragging the vertical divider bar did nothing, quitting the application did nothing – Flash simply stopped responding. So I forced quit the application, restarted it – same thing. Tried a third time, no luck. Someone suggested it was time for a reboot, that solved the mysterious crash, and the presentation went along fine.

Afterwards, I checked my graphics driver and other possible culprits, and found nothing was out of the ordinary; they were all the latest versions. It has something to do with leaving Flash running in the background, plugging the laptop into the projector, and (automatically) switching the screen resolution. Or it could be because I normally connect to an LCD screen through the DVI port, but the projector uses the analog VGA port…

This shows that things will go wrong at the time that you definitely don’t want it to happen. But that’s life, next time I’ll remember not to leave applications running while plugging the laptop into the projector.