October 29, 2007
Adobe products and Leopard support
Adobe has posted an FAQ about Leopard support for CS products.
Yes, Flash Player 9 is Leopard-compatible and we will continue to work with Apple on any outstanding issues. We're working on a player specific technote to call out known issues, such as the one with FileReference upload/download which will be fixed in the upcoming Moviestar release.
Posted by ehuang at 12:47 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
September 25, 2007
Flash Player 9 @ 93.3% in September penetration study
The September stats are now up on Adobe.com. Thanks to Millward-Brown and our web team for giving us a quick turnaround so we could get these live before Adobe MAX.
The first row is how we present the data on the website. It tells you the percentage of people that can view a SWF of that version. The second row, is the % of the population with that player version installed (the delta between v and v+1).
| September 2007 - Mature Markets | v6 | v7 | v8 | v9 |
| % able to view content by SWF version | 99.1% | 99.1% | 98.4% | 93.3% |
| Install base by version | 0.0%* | 0.7% | 5.1% | 93.3% |
* Looks like people finally retired their old machines and are upgrading to more current hardware :-)
Posted by ehuang at 12:27 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
September 13, 2007
10 Cities. Colin Moock. Learn ActionScript 3.0. For free.
Are you a Flash user with beginning to intermediate programming skills? Do you want a chance to learn ActionScript 3.0 from the author of the best-selling Essential ActionScript 3.0?
Sign up for Colin Moock’s ActionScript 3.0: From the Ground Up Tour.
Join Colin Moock for a one-day training that covers everything you need to get started programming in ActionScript 3.0.
Sign up now, I'm sure seats will go fast.
Posted by ehuang at 07:55 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
July 27, 2007
Detection kit: SWFFix 0.2 public alpha now available
The SWFFix Dev blog announced on Wednesday the public alpha of a new open source detection kit. The best detection minds are working together to solve your Flash Player embedding and detection issues -- the project was started by Geoff Stearns (of SWFObject), Bobby Van der Sluis (of UFO) and Michael Williams from the Flash Player team (Adobe detection kit and Express Install).
Posted by ehuang at 03:28 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
July 10, 2007
Flash Player 9 for Solaris now available!
Flash Player 9 (9.0.47) for Solaris (x86 and sparc) is now available for download at adobe.com.
Flash Player on Solaris supports Solaris 10. The functionality is equivalent to the original Linux release in January, so keep in mind this means no full-screen mode support. The only new known issue is that the player on Solaris does not support any camera or sound drivers at this time. Release Notes
Thanks to everyone who tested the beta on Adobe Labs!
Posted by ehuang at 07:18 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack
June 20, 2007
Check out State of Security - a new Adobe blog
Got a question about the how security works, or why the security behavior is the way it is in Flash Player, AIR and Reader? Check out Lucas Adamski's new blog State of Security. Lucas is our Platform Security Strategist, and recently published an article on cross-domain policy files on the Developer Center. He's a great resource internally, and I'm happy to see him share his expertise with the community through this new blog!
Posted by ehuang at 11:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 16, 2007
Adobe Media Player - for what you watch, when you want to watch it
We announced a new, free desktop media player at NAB today called the Adobe Media Player, which will be available for download as a prerelease on Adobe Labs later this year. It's one of the first Apollo applications from Adobe, and it's exciting to see us working on such a great showcase application. Yes, you can download and play your Flash videos straight from the desktop!
It's been one of those long standing requests from the community that we provide some way to play FLV content back in an "official" standalone player. But Adobe Media Player is much more than a simple standalone FLV Player - it rounds out our internet video offerings by providing a new way for content providers to deliver their content, and end-users to access their favorite TV shows and video podcasts in the web's most popular video format. More info in the press release and the FAQ on Adobe Labs.
Of course, Flash Player continues to be the preferred choice for streaming content within the browser, and the team is working with the Flash Media Server and Apollo teams to deliver enhancements. We're working on further improving the quality and performance of full screen viewing, and you'll see that show up in a future update to Flash Player 9 as well as Apollo (which means, of course, Adobe Media Player can take advantage of it for high-fidelity video playback.) We'll also support the encrypted streaming enhancements mentioned in the media player press release, in a Flash Player 9 update later this year.
Stay tuned to Adobe Labs for the prerelease of Adobe Media Player!
Posted by ehuang at 12:01 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
April 12, 2007
Flash Player Download Center on Adobe.com will start offering Google Toolbar today
Starting today, visitors to the Flash Player Download Center on Adobe.com may be presented with the option to install the free Google Toolbar as part of the download process. The offer is only made to visitors using Internet Explorer on Windows, who don't already have the Google Toolbar installed. This is part of the Google Toolbar agreement announced last June, and the toolbar is also being offered on the Adobe Reader Download Center and as part of the Shockwave Player installation process. Yes, this does mean that the Yahoo! Toolbar is no longer being offered on the Download Center. For more information about the toolbar offer, please visit the FAQ.
This offer is only made on Adobe.com for Flash Player and developers can continue to design in-context installation experiences for their site that do not require sending users to Adobe.com. Adobe also offers free distribution licenses for intranet and fixed media distribution of Flash Player.
Posted by ehuang at 02:00 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack
November 06, 2006
New open source project with code contributed from Adobe ActionScript Virtual Machine
Adobe has contributed source code from the ActionScript Virtual Machine* to a new open source project, called Tamarin, to be hosted by the Mozilla Foundation. The goal is to build a high-performance open source implementation of the ECMAScript 4th edition (ES4) language specification. The project page and source code will be immediately available as part of this announcement.
Now Mozilla and Adobe can to work together with the community to bring Tamarin to SpiderMonkey, the core JavaScript engine in Firefox. Tamarin is also way for open source developers to work on a core part of the Flash Player, which will continue to use the Tamarin virtual machine as part of the ActionScript Virtual Machine in future versions of Flash Player.
Check out the following resources to learn more about the project:
Press Release
Developer Center Logged In article
Tamarin project page on mozilla.org
Tamarin FAQ
If you're interested in more details, there is a great opportunity to join an IRC chat about Mozilla 2 plans with Brendan Eich, Mozilla CTO and creator of JavaScript and special guest Kevin Lynch, Adobe's chief software architect, tomorrow at 10AM PST.
* No, Adobe is not open sourcing the Flash Player. ;-P We are contributing source code for the ActionScript Virtual Machine, the scripting language engine component within Flash Player. ActionScript 3.0 runs on the Tamarin virtual machine in Flash Player 9.
Posted by ehuang at 09:11 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
August 29, 2006
Ryan Stewart interviews Mike Melanson, Linux Flash Player engineer
Ryan has an interview with the author of Penguin.SWF on his ZDNet blog. If you've been following Mike's blog, this is probably mostly a recap of the topics that have already been discussed. But sometimes it's nice to see it all summarized in one place, and hopefully it will reach out to a wider audience and spread the good word.
Posted by ehuang at 12:54 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
June 22, 2005
New Mac OSX installers posted
We recently posted a tech note to help people on Mac 10.3.x (Panther) with a problem where the 10.1 installer didn't update the pre-installed v9 player properly.
This issue has come up more and more frequently -- maybe because people are hitting new Shockwave 10 content out there -- in the past few months. Basically, if you run the installer, it will appear to complete correctly. But when you view Shockwave content, the area will be blank and/or you will see a "shockwave failed to load" error dialog.
We originally had a hard time reproducing it, so the fix was unclear. Well, we've got it figured out now. Some Panther builds had incorrectly set the plug-in so it couldn't be overwritten (which Apple seems to have fixed for later builds after we reported the issue, thus the mixed bag of results.) We updated the installer to use the "always overwrite the file" option so that it overwrites the existing plug-in every time.
It's fixed now, and the right bits are on the player download center. If you have customers who have reported issues with Shockwave Player on Panther, send them to download the latest installer from macromedia.com.
Another useful tidbit: the Mac installer is also the uninstaller. If you click on the "Easy Install" drop-down in the upper left corner, the drop-down will show the "Uninstall" option.
Posted by ehuang at 09:20 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 16, 2005
dev center: creating bitmaps with alpha channels
Karl Sigiscar has a new article on the Director Developer Center that describes five simple techniques to create alpha channles for your Flash and Director applications.
Posted by ehuang at 04:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 08, 2005
macromix technote and authoring xtra available
The technote for the Macromix Xtra bug fix is live, and contains the downloads for authoring.
Posted by ehuang at 06:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 02, 2005
minor install process change, and Macromix bugfix
Last week we made a few minor tweaks to the installation process, and released an updated Macromix Xtra to fix a crashing bug. Sorry to hold the info for so long, but I was waiting for the tech note for the bugfix to go live ... and am still waiting ...
Installer: The final step/dialog, that asks users if they want to use the "highly recommended" auto-update notification service has been removed from the registration process. Our research shows that most people elect to leave the service on during the registration process. We felt the additional dialog could be removed, further reducing the number of dialogs in the process. The player auto-update service continues to be optional, and is on by default upon installation. As before, users who do not wish to use the service can change the setting in the player context menu.
Relevant URLs:
Tech note describing how to disable the auto-update service : http://www.macromedia.com/go/tn_16683
Information page describing the service, and Macromedia’s privacy policy : http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/productinfo/privacy/
Macromix: There was a bug in the Macromix sound device code that would cause intermittent crashes when stopping sound files using sound().stop(), and typically problems occurred when rapidly starting and stopping a number of short sounds. This issue was exposed on some older Windows systems. The Macromix Xtra was updated to properly handle latency issues and prevent crashes in these situations.
I'll post the link to the tech note for this issue, with a link to download the updated Xtra for authoring as soon as it is available. Should be next week.
Posted by ehuang at 05:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
mini face-lift
We gave the Director product pages a mini-facelift, which just went live on the site. Because this is often the starting point for people looking for information about Director, we wanted to update the page with a focus on attracting new customers, encouraging upgrades, and providing a better “portal” to customers for indexing the Director-related information.
Some of the little tweaks off the top of my head (now that I don't have the old site to compare to...):
- New links to "Xtras Extensions" and "Shockwave Player Home" in the right hand nav
- Aligned the "Why Upgrade" section to call out the features we discovered were the key drivers for upgrades through customer surveys
- Added a case study to start the Director in Action section, which will be swapped out as new ones come in
- Added a better call-out for Shockwave Player at the end
ciao,
e
Posted by ehuang at 04:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 13, 2005
Safari 3D offset technote is live
The tech note about the 3D offset in Safari has been posted. FYI, the note at the bottom will be updated to read "Note: This issue does not occur in other supported Mac OS X browsers, only Safari."
Posted by ehuang at 04:46 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
April 29, 2005
Info about Apple "Tiger" release and Macromedia tools
Apple OS X Tiger, which has a ton of interesting new features, is coming out today. Before you upgrade, be sure to check the Macromedia & Tiger Compatibility tech note to understand all the known issues with Macromedia products on Tiger so there aren't any surprises that interrupt your daily workflow. We are working with Apple to resolve these issues.
There aren't many new issues with Director or Shockwave Player compatibility with the Tiger release. But before you pounce all over us with your claws out, *yes* the 3D offset bug still exists in the new version of Safari. Note that in the new Safari, the offset is made worse by an additional 30 pixels or so. If you hide the address bar, you get the old 20 pixel bug behavior. Tom and our QA team have diligently tracked and babysat this bug through the process, and Apple knows this is the bug the product team cares most about getting fixed in the updates. We also highlighted that this new version of Safari exacerbated the problem. Obviously, we can't promise anything about what the resolution will be, but the right people know about it.
We are working on a tech note about the 3D offset bug to be posted later today, which will let users know that the workaround is to either use Software Rendering in Safari, or use a different browser. You might want to consider detecting Safari and letting users know what their options are for viewing your content properly. Our system requirements for Mac only list Netscape and IE, but it does work in Firefox. Actually, I believe 3D works fine in pretty much any browser *except* Safari (and I believe we've seen issues in Camino as well.)
You can view the Director Emerging Issues tech note here.
Posted by ehuang at 12:56 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack