Saturday,
25 Aug 2007
Moviestar - what happened to SWFAddress?
The latest Flash Player Beta release is great: H.264 support, hardware acceleration, immediate Linux availability. I thought that currently I don't have the time to test the new features, but a little bit later I was warned that SWFAddress does not work with this update. While this is something which can be expected from a Beta version I felt obliged to investigate what is the reason behind this failure.
The release notes of the Moviestar update say that the ExternalInterface has been improved and this sounded like a potential reason for my SWFAddress troubles. Yesterday I found some time for experimenting which led me to the following:
- The AS1 and AS2 samples does not produce deep links, the script fails silently.
- The unreleased Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit sample works quite well.
- The Flex2 sample and some other AS3 experiments behave as expected.
So it appeared that there is only a problem with AVM1 and ExternalInterface. After some more testing I came to the conclusion that:
Basically simple function work, but object methods no longer can be called. I suspect that this is not a desired behavior and I've created a test case which is available for download. The bug is now also submitted to Adobe and you should do the same if you find any other issues with your existing content.
Update: Everything is back to normal with the Flash Player 9.0.64 release. Thanks to everybody involved in this quick fix!
Comments:
Yep, I noticed it too. Already with the last FP9 beta.
Hi. i need to know how you can to do make work fine the exmple with Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit sample, or post the example please.
The IntKit sample is available in the project's SVN repository on sourceforge.net. It will be soon available in our next release.
I've just got back from MAX Barcelona where I mentioned this to one of the flash Player Architects (without realizing it's been fixed already in the latest release). He was so approachable and keen to make sure it was in the bug list so they could deal with it. It just goes to show how on the ball these guys are and how they are committed to making sure new versions of the flash player don't break our sites. Just thought I'd share that with you ;)