I’m pleased to announce version 1.2 of my FlashObject script. The big new addition is minor version detection and revision detection, so now you can detect versions like "6.0.65" if you like. I also got some advice from Toby Boudreaux, who provided tons of help in getting the code all fancied up and name spaced, so it shouldn’t collide with any other scripts on your websites now. We also went through and leaned out some features that weren’t being used much. Namely the fo.altTxt var and the extra line that included the bypass detection link. You can still bypass the detection just as you have been, but the script will no longer automatically write the alternate content at all (even if you manually override it like you could in v.1.1). If you have no idea what that last sentance means, just ignore it, as you probably weren’t using the feature anyway.

I’ve also given FlashObject a permanent home at http://blog.deconcept.com/flashobject/.

Here’s the full list of what has changed:

• fo.write() now requires an element ID. In previous versions you could call write() with no parameters and the FlashObject script would write the Flash movie to the page wherever the script was placed on the page. This is no longer the case and now you must specify an element ID.
• fo.altTxt no longer exists. You must now place all your alternate content or upgrade message in the div where your Flash content will be written.
• fo.redirect no longer exists. When using FlashObject to redirect users to a separate upgrade page, you now specify the redirect url like this: fo.setAttribute('redirectUrl', 'http://www.example.com');

I highly recommend upgrading to this version. While I was adding the minor version detection, I found a bug that will cause Netscape plugin based browsers to fail the Flash detection once the major version gets up to two digits. That means it will work fine up to Flash 9, but then return 0 if the user has Flash player 10 (this is all assuming Macromedia keeps incrementing the version numbers, and that Adobe doesn’t change everything around when they take over).

So that’s it. This will probably be the last version update to FlashObject, since there isn’t much else I could add that would be useful to everyone. So go tell your friends about it – there’s really no reason you shouldn’t be using this to embed your Flash movies.

UPDATE: Dave Benjamin pointed out a flaw in the new detection checking function, and that has been fixed. I also fixed a very small issue with the version check that would cause it to fail if you had version 9.1.0, and the page required 8.2.0 (for example), so make sure you get the latest version.

UPDATE (07-27-2005): Matthew Richmond set me up with a better looking test file, that also shows the full page version much better, so the download / example pages have been updated.

UPDATE (08-01-2005): Just fixed a bug in the detection function that would throw an error when no Flash player was installed, thus casing the redirect to fail if you were trying to redirect users to an upgrade page. Thanks to Carl Wurtz for pointing that out. I also took the chance to update the ActiveX plugin detection code. No more VBscript in there (not even an execscript() call). New version number is 1.2.2 – make sure you have the latest version!