Time to update your Flash Player. According to Cnet, Adobe has released a new update to Flash Player to bring all you non-beta users up to 8.0.24.0. Adobe recommends all users of Flash player up to version 8.0.22.0 update their player via download. Apparently a vulnerability has been found that allows 'evil' SWF files to take control of a user's system when loaded into current version of the player. So head over to the link below and update your systems. The problem affects Breeze 5, Shockwave 10.1.0.11 and Flash debug player 7.0.14 (and earlier of course).

The first of the early adopters to realize his mistake has returned his brand new iMac with Intel after just 24 hours. Unfortunately for Jed Wood of SilentRant.com the failure of Flash on the new iMac (specifically in Safari and Firefox under Rosetta) forced him to return his smooth new Mac. Again, careful how early you adopt, he ended up lucking into a trade in on the PowerPC iMac, but almost suffered a 10 percent restocking fee.

via yesterday's comments

Since the release of the new Mac Book Pro and iMac with Intel I have been considering when to make the upgrade and move on to a new laptop. A few things are keeping me in check though. First off, this is a first gen or Alpha product that is going to have bugs (this is jus the nature of technology). Second off there are no 'Universal' binaries for Studio or any other Adobe products for that matter. But what about Rosetta? Well It doesn't look like Rosetta is very nice to Flash's new step brother. Photoshop CS2 runs much slower on the new Intel iMacs in speed tests, according to Ars Technica. Plus, according to the latest Photoshop TV video podcast, Adobe has a previous history of not release incremental updates, hence they think Photoshop will not be 'Universal' til CS3 (grab the vodcast yourself and watch between 16:40 and 18:10 for more info). But Photoshop isn't Studio. Actually, now that Flash and Macromedia are tied to Adobe, I think Flash and therefore Studio will be tied (at least loosely) to Photoshop. So if you feel the need for speed, it is probably a good idea to hold off on purchasing the new Mac Intels. At least wait till someone jumps on the bandwagon with official speed tests for Flash and FLV encoding.

Currently I'm going to consider a semi-update to a 'new' PowerBook instead and pray Flash Player 8.5 includes the first Universal Binary from Adobe, because as of right now Flash Player 8 does npt appeast to work in Safari on Intel without forcing Safari to run under Rosetta.

JD is worrying about this too, but what to do you think?

via The Unofficial Photoshop Weblog

Knee jerk reaction correction time... yes I did have a knee jerk reaction to what I thought would be a really cool thing. A combo Flash player and Adobe reader plugin and application would hopefully mean a possible slimmer (read more memory efficient) Reader and a more robust Player... but I guess it just wasn't meant to be. Numerous corrections have been flowing out of the former Macromedia heavy-weights so I thought I should write up a quick oops post to help move us forward.

Let's look at this from another angle. Would you prefer a combo app? Maybe an Apple Preview Application mixed with the Flash player in a Flash Paper way... or how about we take some Acrobat functionality and bundle it into Actionscript. I would love to dynamically edit and create PDFs on the fly (for free... I paid a few hundred for the app already, sorry Derek) then we could add a print to PDF functionality to all Flash-based apps that would mimic that great Apple print function... What do you think?

PS: sorry mike, my bad...

I’ve been having computer problems. Internet Explorer kept taking forever to load sites and Firefox wasn’t really being friendly on my Windows box. So what do I do? Uninstall Flash player 8 first. It’s a beta and sometimes they cause problems. Then I install Flash Player 7 and test out my browsers again. Everything back to normal, whoo-hoo! But now I don’t have 8 anymore, and I want it, heck I need it. What do I do? Go back to the Flash Player 8 page and re-install. Test again and voila, all works perfect. It seems I having been keeping up to date. Now I have Flash Player version 8,0,15,0 installed, the latest and greatest player. Now it’s your turn to make sure you’re up to date. Open a website with a Flash movie or game or application and right-click or control click (Mac). Select About Flash Player 8… from the drop down menu. This will open a page on Macromedia’s site with more information on Flash player. On the right your version number will be displayed. If you don’t have 8,0,15,0 as of today, you don’t have the latest version of the beta. Upgrade for the best experience. Remember it’s beta so it’s not really done yet. If you want this to be more automatic you can change your automatic global notifications to check for Flash player updates as often as every 7 days via the Macromedia Flash Player Settings Manager’s Global Notification Settings Panel.

Nintendo has put up a simplistic Flash-based site extolling the wonders of the coming Game Boy micro. Now you and I can realize the future of ignoring the world via a extremely small portable game device that has no internet connectivity (like cell phones the same size) and does play with Flash (like PDAs and cell phones the same size). I have the Flash 8 beta player installed of course and the size actually threw the familiar you don’t have Flash error. Yes Nintendo has not followed good design principles with their site and have the following Flash check in their JavaScript:

var requiredVersion = 6;
var flashVersion = getFlashVersion();
if (flashVersion < requiredVersion && getCookie("ignoreflash") != "yes") {
top.location = '/no_flash.vm';
}

and

etc. Oh, come on Nintendo. There is no reason why any major professionally made site should throw an error with their user upgrades the required plug-in. You need to call up your site designers and give them a good slap in the face and demand free site edits to correct this issue. Jeez. In the mean time click the yes I understand my Flash might not work with this site button if you want to see the main Nintendo site and you have Flash 8 player beta installed. I know this is a nit-picky rant, but major world-wide companies should not have these kind of site design issues.

via Joystiq; JavaScript via Nintendo

Macromedia has an updated TechNote describing exactly how to remove the Flash Player plug-in from any web browser and operating system. They recommend using the custom pre-built uninstallers to remove the plug-in, but there are also full manual un-install instructions for those of you who like a challenge. Now you’re reading this and wondering: Why if a Flash blog telling me how to get rid of Flash? The uninstall TechNote comes with instructions to remove Flash Player 8 beta. If you feel like you’ve gotten stuck with a buggy player before it time or if you have a requirement for Firefox that blocking Flash will not meet or if you need to test a site in an older version of Flash this will definitely help.

While reading about how much faster Flash 8 is on Mac you may have noticed the bug discovered by Macromedia inside the Firefox web browser that so many of you hold dear. In Firefox when a new tab is opened the browser does not notify plug-ins, which in turn can cause browser death. (Opera also seems to be suffering from this same issue.) In my case, even before Flash 8, Firefox will kill if too many Flash-based sites are open in various tabs. According to the bug report, Safari (the tab-based Mac-based web browser) does notify the plug so Flash player knows to stop running OpenGL on tab switching. This isn’t just a Flash problem though. Conceivably various other plug-ins could need the tab switch notification as well.

How can this lower browser share? Flash 7 is already installed on something like 98% of all computers in the world (that’s a larger market share than even Microsoft) and if it starts killing web browsers (specifically one’s new to the market or with low market share) then users will start choosing their browser of choice based on how it handles their application of choice. I.E. you want to play that new Flash game, but having it and three other sites open kills Firefox aren’t you going to just open Safari or MSIE instead? Mozilla is currently working on this issue, but in the mean time, Flash developers need to be aware of the issue and design sites accordingly. This might mean pausing your site on lose focus or just keeping the hard core look low. These aren’t really solutions for most of us though, so look for the next release of Firefox to hopefully fix the issue.

Well, not really. According to a new Macromedia technote, users of older operating systems will need to just deal with their now obsolete limited functionality Flash 7 player. Yes, that sound you hear is the world’s smallest violin playing… well you know. What this means is if you run Windows 95, NT or Classic Mac operating systems you will be unable to use the new version of Flash Player due to upgrades that utilize “technology in the latest operating systems for performance, functionality and efficiency.” The other reason has a little something to do with the lack of support for these operating systems by their own software companies. Basically, why should Macromedia have to figure out how to support somebody else’s software, when they don’t even support it. For me this means I have a new reason to try to convince my wife that her rev B 2000 iMac running Mac OS 9.2 needs to be replaced in order to play the latest coolest web games, view Flash video and generally do things she doesn’t use the computer for. Also, now developers don’t have to test their work in the older web browsers any more and Internet Explorer for Mac can finally be put to bed.

via John Dowdell

Our tips box spit out a link to a freeware Flash-based blog to test our over at the Fierri design studio in Europe. I am totally in love with Wordpress so I am always interested in blog freeware and I jumped over to the site to check it out. I really like the idea of a total Flash blog that features an image gallery (non-progressive JPG only of course) and an online content management interface based in Flash, but I think this software may need a Flash developer community touch. The developer set out to create a blog that can be setup almost anywhere without a database requirement, but I think this may have to many partially finished features and needs a more fleshed out documentation.

Full review after the jump.

If you’re using Firefox and love extensions you need to get rid of Greasemonkey for a little while, or at least upgrade to the new stripped down version 0.3.5. All other versions of Greasemonkey contain a flaw that “allows any website which matches at least one user script (even * scripts) to read any local file on [the user’s] machine, or to list the connect of local directories.” As you can imagine this is extremely dangerous and can make your computer and network very insecure. The security bulletin applies to all types of computers: Mac, PC, and Unix.

This reminds me of the security issues Flash had right after the release of Flash player 7 including fixed buffer overflow problems and domain name spoofing. Macromedia was able to quickly turn out a security fix and although a large corporation doesn’t make Greasemonkey I’m sure they will be able to do the same soon. So remember, this doesn’t mean the end of the very useful extension that can add any JavaScript you want to any website, it just means a security update is coming.

For updates check out the official GreaseMonkey page and our sister blog, Download Squad

via theofficeweblog

FlashCoders mailing list was a buzz this morning with Maelstrom (Flash Player 8) news. Around the world the sound of the great install and test could be heard.

What have we learned so far?

In Firefox, restart after install and if you have AdBlock installed you need to disable it. The player seems to work fine in Internet Explorer for Windows. Maelstrom is installable in all Windows 98 and later. It is installable in Mac OSX 10.x. Sorry no Unix yet. According to Macromedia it should work in Safari, Firefox (for Mac, though the mailing list says it works on PC), Internet Explorer (for Mac and PC), Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, and AOL.

Bugs?

Ivan Dembicki of Design.ru says there are two backwards compatibility bugs. “after deleting this.onEnterFrame method, FP7: onEnterFrame method from prototype started, FP8: onEnterFrame method from prototype NOT started” and “after changing __proto__ if new __proto__ contained onRelease, onPress etc, FP7: movieclip handled Buttons events, FP8: movieclip not handled Buttons events”

Franto and Alex mention a problem communication with Javascript. “using FSCommand to call javascript on a local page generates a security error”

On the bright side, Maelstrom runs faster and smoother for large Flash sites and even with Flash based XML sites.

Now its your turn, grab the beta at the link.

When I was still in school as an art major I discovered an undocumented feature (or bug) in the Camera() class that allows Flash to take a still photo of a user and then manipulate that photo. This class is normally used in connection with a Flash Communication Server to create a teleconferencing application with integrated streaming video. A video feed is grabbed from a user’s computer, with their permission, and streamed to an external server. At the same time the feed can be displayed in for the user in the Flash project they have opened. When the feed is disconnected it leaves a residual image that can be manipulated within a movieclip and possibly printed via the user’s computer.

Check out the complete tutorial after the jump.