Flash player

[gospastic]

Hello there -

Anyone have any suggestions regarding Flash players on Macs?

I can uninstall the player from a PC and reinstall older versions for testing purposes, but have found nothing similar on a Mac.

Any ideas folks?

Thanks in advance...

[zumojuice]

What mac version are you hoping to test? You might be able to run one under classic mode maybe?

Failing this all, post a link to your work in progress. We can all go there and post screen shots and comments on the workability (along with our OS/Browser/Flash Player).

Mind you, as a general rule, you if design for a later version of flash, the older versions will either force and upgrade or just not work.

[Toon]

What mac version are you hoping to test? You might be able to run one under classic mode maybe?

There is no classic mode on the new OS

[zumojuice]

Oh really? Balls! My bad, thanks Toon!

[gospastic]

I do not really understand how people can test SWF's on earlier versions of players. I wonder if there is some kind of application floating around for this purpose?

[LeadMagnet]

I haven't really given it much thought, but if you save your flash file for the lower version of flash player (e.g. Flash player 7) and play it in flash player 9, it'll look the same as it would in flash player 7, no?
I know that any features or code you add which aren't supported by an earlier flash version are removed when you do that (e.g. drop shadows). What am i missing?

[gospastic]

Well as I understand it, when you test your SWF through a browser Flash player it is not exactly the same as the player that comes with Flash.

For example if I play a SWF through Flash with publish settings for player 7, it gives me a different result to if I uninstall the browser player from my machine and then install Flash browser player 7.

IE needs a activex based Flash player installed, Firefox needs a regular Flash player. If you uninstall all flash browser players from your computer, and then open firefox, the prompt takes you to the Adobe download site for Flash and gives you a exe file on your desktop. If you open IE it takes you to the same Adobe page, but installs two plug ins - and does not require any exe on your desktop.

Complicated and boring stuff I know.

If you could simply test your SWF by changing the publish settings in Flash that would be so easy - but I feel the SWF needs to be tested via the Flash generated HTML file in both IE and Firefox browsers themselves too.

[LeadMagnet]

So is it the embedding process you're testing?
Can you give an example of the differences you experience between the players?
Is it just a performance difference? One's faster than the other? Or will some features just not work?

[gospastic]

Well I have not gone into this whole area much - but right now I am trying to get some kind of player detection script to run before all of my Flash sites, and so knocked up one - which works OK on the Flash player from 5 upwards but on the browser player does not work (blank white screen) using players 6 and 7 but works OK on 8 and 9.

I hate this kind of stuff! I always get distracted by it, and end up thinking 'oh forget it' - there are so many avenues to investigate, you start off thinking this will only take a few hours and you end up having to do so much research!

There is pretty good thread here:

Flash Player Detection Techniques Unearthed [Flash Tutorials]

but it is over 4 years old and I cannot find anything more up to date. Plus, I am using almost the same AS as suggested in this thread (I followed the 'Inbuilt Flash Player Version Detection') which clearly does not work.

I am going to sort this one out once and for all though - so any help would be most welcome, LeadMagnet!

[LeadMagnet]

I'm still not 100% sure what the problem is, but i can help with the flash player detection script at least.
deconcept › SWFObject: Javascript Flash Player detection and embed script
I found that link yesterday ^^
It makes adding flash to your site very simple. You create a div with any content you like. Usually something like "Improper flash version detected" or whatever you want. You add the short JS code and it will replace the contents of the div with your flash movie.

The great thing is, you can specify the minimum version of flash player you need to have, and if the client doesn't meet the minimum requirements, the div will stay as it was in the beginning.

It really simplifies the process alot i think.

I haven't tried it because i don't think it's worth the effort, but i imagine that you could have multiple versions of your flash movie available for different versions of the player. Either by using a few conditional if statements in the JS or else by simply queuing up the embedding code in the right order would do it.
It would add 1 swf for a low version, then it would attempt to replace that with a higher version but would leave the low version there if the player version detection fails on the higher version.

Sorry if i'm being confusing.