Comments on: FlashObject 1.2

By: Geoff

Geoff — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 19:47:22 +0000

I released FlashObject 1.3 today, so I’m closing the comments on this page.

If you would like to leave comments about FlashObject, please do so on the FlashObject 1.3 post.

By: Geoff

Geoff — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 19:46:26 +0000

Sounds odd… have you changed your plugins at all? Maybe try uninstalling/reinstalling the Flash plugin in IE?

By: Alan

Alan — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 19:19:16 +0000

Hi, I’ve been trying out FlashObject and it works great, except for on IE6 where it can’t find the Flash file!
The page just sticks with (1 item remaining) and lays there. Take a look at http://www.alanmoore.info/ and there should be a flash movie on the right below the menu.
The only thing that’s different really is that the div element is positioned, not floated.
What’s weird is it worked on IE the other day… and it still works under Safari. Any clues?

By: spl.database

spl.database — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 00:39:27 +0000

I’m having problems getting more than one flash object to display on my page.
Could anyone give me a code example or point me in the right direction?
I’ve read in previous posts something about changing the div id tag but after some trial/error I get one swf to load while only the alt content displays for the second. I’m still not sure about how to do this correctly.
Any help will be Greatly appreciated…
Thank you all, spl.database

By: Geoff

Geoff — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 02:28:48 +0000

Sure. If you wanted to invoke the browser’s install dialog, you could put a link to bypass the detection. This would attempt to show the Flash content and the browser should try to find the plugin.

The other button that shows the alternate content would be a little trickier and would require a bit more Javascript.

You might consider showing your alternate content and then adding a small message saying ‘for the full experience please intall the macromedia (adobe?) flash player’ and the link could just be the bypass detection link (see the example page for how to use the bypass detection link)

By: Brad Rench

Brad Rench — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 19:08:46 +0000

Is it possible to give the user the option to download Flash Player if it’s not installed? From what I can see, if Flash is not installed, the alternate content (e.g. an image in the flashcontent div) is displayed. But if Flash is not installed, I want to do something like display two buttons (Install, Don’t Install). The Install button would do the same thing that a browser (like IE or Firefox) does — that is, it installs Flash without going to the Macromedia download page. The Don’t Install button would simply show the alternate content.

By: Kenny

Kenny — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 12:56:58 +0000

Hi Jason,

I have the same problem and only with FP6 versions earlier than 6,0,56 on IE – it consistently causes the browser to crash when detecting with FlashObject v. 1.2.3. These players have no problem accessing other pages, i.e. http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/about/

By: Nils

Nils — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 11:07:25 +0000

and here is an example: [code] var fo = new FlashObject("flash/home.swf", "home", "630", "267", "6", "#ffffff"); fo.setAttribute('redirectUrl', 'index_flash.html'); fo.setAttribute('redirectIfValid', true); fo.write(""); [/code]

By: Nils

Nils — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 11:06:11 +0000

Hi – I wanted to redirect if the Flash version is valid – the opposite of the current functionality. I changed the code a little and added a ‘redirectIfValid’ variable (needed changes to constructor and ‘write’ method). You can download the changed version at http://www.hub124.net/test/flashobject.js – could something like this be added to the main build?

- Nils.

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 12:03:48 +0000

I’ve been pulling my hair out the last couple of days testing flash player 6.0.23.0 and 6.0.29.0 with the flashObject script. Works fine in Firefox and Opera, but IE refuses to work. I’ve found that it’s only these two players (they’re old I know) that don’t work and it appears to be something to do with the “new ActiveXObject(“ShockwaveFlash.ShockwaveFlash”)” code in the javascript file. The older version of flashObject (the one that used vbscript to detect the version in IE) appears to detect the flash player version correctly. Can anyone out there please shed some light on this for me, either by testing these players with there flashObject scripts or enlightening me as to why those two players don’t appear to like the javascript IE player detection scripting…?

Thanks in advance

Jason

By: Geoff

Geoff — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 12:11:20 +0000

Billy,

Well Nathan was only having problems with Flashvars and only with using many many flash movies on a single page. Can you be more specific about what is wrong? FlashObject has been tested in all versions of Safari, and there are no issues that I know of.

By: billyO

billyO — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 04:45:30 +0000

Geoff, thanks SO MUCH for this. Amazing. I, like Nathan previously, noticed that Safari just isnt happy. I *just* downloaded this, so unfortunately I hadn’t even found out why. But since he hasnt answered the version question, I’m using version 7.x plugin. I think it would suck to have to download a *new* Flash plugin to view material that’s built using FlashMX2004 (7). And i’m using Tiger. I have no idea if that screws with anything.

Let me know if you want me to dig on something….

By: Geoff

Geoff — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 13:24:09 +0000

You should be able to simply replace the FlashTag calls with FlashObject calls… but you might want to disable the plugin detection on some of the calls – when you send a value to the Flash movie, you don’t want to check for the Flash player again because it might be a little slower. It probably wouldn’t be noticably slower to most people, but there could be small delays in passing values back and forth.

You can disable the detection by using this line:

...
fo.skipDetect = true;
...

By: telecharger msn

telecharger msn — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 13:16:51 +0000

Hi!

I’m currently playing a bit with the Flash Javascript Kit Integration.
I was wondering how I could make worked together the FlashTag and FlashObject classes.
Any advices ?

Thanks.

By: Whitespace

Whitespace — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 20:23:34 +0000

I must say this is really, really top quality work and ethos. Making and posting this code is one of the most worthwhile things I think anyone could have done – nice one!

One comment: pages are validated as strict xml, etc. in order to ensure that people writing programmes are able to render the document properly. If I make an xhtml1.1 page that validates by including a script file that then writes invalid html code (eg: codebase=”…”) to the document held in the browser’s memory, the document is invalid and may be parsed / rendered incorrectly. While this method is A* and will fool your client into thinking the page is ‘valid therfore futureproof’, don’t fool yourself. You may not see invalid source when you hit Ctrl+U in FireFox, but FireFox does when you spit it out and just happens to render it properly.

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 16:00:24 +0000

(About replacing the FlashTag references with FlashObject code)

I will dig in this direction…,
Thanks for the clue!

By: Geoff

Geoff — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 15:52:55 +0000

Nathan,

I went to the sample page you posted with Safari (2.0 on OS X 10.4.2), and then to his homepage with the multiple ’speak’ buttons, and clicked most of them with no problems. Each one played the correct audio.

I’m using Flash player 8 public beta player – so maybe this was an issue in earlier Flash players? What player version do you have installed, and what version of Safari are you using?

By: Geoff

Geoff — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 15:44:15 +0000

Michael,

I believe the FlashTag js file uses very similar syntax to FlashObject, so it would probably very simple to modify the integration kit code to use FlashObject instead. It would just be a matter of finding all the FlashTag references and replacing them with FlashObject code.

By: Nathan

Nathan — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 15:15:52 +0000

Hi Geoff! This thing works great…solved a couple nagging problems for me. I’m working on a page with multiple (8) embedded instances of a flash movie (they’re fancy flash hotspots over the top of a “casement window” image pointing out the different features of the window). Anyways, everything’s working pretty solid, except for Safari. Safari doesn’t seem to like the use of FlashVars as a variable WHEN you’re instantiating multiple flash objects that all are using the same .swf file. I finally found this link documenting the problem, but no solutions.

http://www.impossibilities.com/blog/entry_blog-106.php

I noticed that I can get up to 3 or 4 flash objects to “embed”? properly, but once I add any more, things get pretty dicey, and anything over 4 starts displaying some serious random functionality upon each page refresh. I even went to the extreme of naming each *.swf with a name1.swf, name2.swf, and that didn’t work either. So now I’m wondering if its not the same .swf name problem, but rather that Safari just can’t handle the heavy duty parsing that’s going on between the html, jscript, etc.

Your embed object actually HELPED this (i could only get two to work simultaneously when using Macromedia’s embed recommendations), but still not good enough, really.

Any thoughts, suggestions?

http://www.impossibilities.com/blog/entry_blog-106.php

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 08:55:07 +0000

Hi!

I’m currently playing a bit with the Flash Javascript Kit Integration.
I was wondering how I could make worked together the FlashTag and FlashObject classes.
Any advices ?

Thanks.