April 2006 Archives
Flash Player 8.5 beta has been renamed Flash Player 9. Nothing else has changed, just the version number. It is expected to ship with the Flex 2.0 launch this summer, so the full version number jump makes sense. Previous Flash Player version numbers have always been consistent with the Flash Player IDE releases (with MX for 6 and MX 2004 for 7).
More info over at Emmy Huang's blog
You know that great FlashObject script for embedding Flash movies? Well, Adobe found out about it, and while they like what it does, they don't like the name. Read more over at Geoff's blog.
begin rant...
Adobe really dropped the ball on this one. FlashObject made detecting and embedding Flash painless and a lot less ugly than all the Flash embedding HTML templates that can be published from within the Flash IDE. It's the best solution for dealing with the whole IE/Eolas/ActiveX issue. They should be thanking Geoff, but instead they're just hurting a well-established (176,000 results in google for "flashobject"), very useful project.
It's not like the name of the script is MacromediaFlashObject or AdobeFlashObject. Then I can maybe see a case for them asking him to change the name.
What's next? Will Adobe begin crawling the web and asking web developers to change their code to replace any JavaScript function, JavaScript variable, X/HTML element, directory name, filename, and web domain that has "Flash" in it?
Am I going to have to change the name of Flash Pearls?
Will I have to remove "Flash Portfolio" from the title of my personal website?
OK I'm taking things to the extreme here, but this really annoyed me (I can't imagine how Geoff must be feeling).
Well, time to populate Google with the new script name:
...end rant
Featured Product - Special Discount
It's been 1 week since the Microsoft IE ActiveX Update, KB912945, that forces users to have to "click to activate and use" ActiveX objects (including Flash) in Internet Explorer, and it seems that some developers are still just realizing this for the first time. Here are a few quick resources on why this "feature" was added and how to deal with it:
- - Wikipedia entry on Eolas, the company that sued Microsoft for violating their patent on using plugins in a web browser, which resulted in Microsoft releasing this update so they would no longer be in violation.
- - If you're using FlashObject to embed your Flash movies, then you already have the "fix" working on your sites and you'll never see the "Click to activate and use this control" message. Geoff also wrote a blog post covering all the details about the IE update that affect you as a web developer.
- - Microsoft's webpage detailing the update, including Known Issues that still need to be fixed. The most notable issue is that if a user has the "Disable Script Debugging (Internet Explorer)" check box unchecked in their Advanced Internet Options, the JavaScript "fix" supposedly does not work as it should. However, the FlashObject fix still works on my computer with that option unchecked, and the only people that would have that option unchecked are web developers, so it should not be a major issue.
