Category Archives: flashobject

SWFObject 2.0 Beta

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Today at Adobe MAX I’ll be giving a presentation with Michael Williams on the next version of SWFObject (previously the SWFFix project). As most of you probably know, I’ve been working on a project with Bobby van der Sluis and Michael Williams (From Adobe) that was going to become the de-facto standard for embedding Flash/Flex content. Well we decided that we didn’t like the new name all that much, so we are adopting the SWFObject name for the project.

The new version is a complete rewrite from SWFObject 1.5, so we’ll need lots of testing before we officially launch it and replace the older SWFObject and UFO scripts, and since we have Adobe involved, they will be including this embed system in the Adobe authoring tools in the future.

The SWFObject project is moving to Google Code, where you can download the source from svn, grab the latest build, or file bugs or read documentation.

I’ve also created a new Google Group for SWFObject support questions and discussion.

If you are at MAX today, our presentation is at 2:45pm in room W-196c and it’s called “Flash Detection and Embedding: An open source solution”.

If you can’t make it today, we’ll be doing it again tomorrw (Wednesday) at 11am in room W-185d.

SWFObject, née FlashObject 1.4 released

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New version is out! The new version is 1.4, and there are only a few small changes/additions:

Go get it!

Changes:

  1. [updated] SWFObject.write() now returns true or false depending on whether the SWF content was written to the page or not (true if it is, false if it is not)
  2. [changed] The ‘com’ namespace has been removed, now everything lives in the ‘deconcept’ namespace only, instead of ‘com.deconcept’ namespace
  3. [updated] I made a couple of very small changes to get rid of warnings in the mozilla script debugger when the debugger was in strict mode
  4. added ‘the mark of the web’ to the examples pages to (hopefully) prevent the ActiveX bar from appearing at the top of the page when viewing these files locally in IE on Windows.
  5. [changed] And last, but certainly not least: FlashObject is now known as SWFObject because of legal reasons

The namespace change is significant if you are directly accessing any of the internal functions inside SWFObject, like the getPlayerVersion() call. This should be easy enough to modify. I’ve also left in the reference to ‘FlashObject’ so if you want to upgrade, but don’t want to update your HTML pages just yet, you should be able to just drop in the new swfobject.js file, update the references to that script, and your SWF files will still show up.

As for the name change: Yes, it has been a pain in the ass, but not as painful as I thought it would be. So far the renaming of the functions / documentations has only consumed a few hours. Changing the mailing list from FlashObject to SWFObject was a bit trickier, and I’m considering just moving it to Google groups instead of the current mailman setup I’m using now.

As for the overall effect of the renaming, I’ve come to think that it may actually be a good thing for SWFObject once the dust settles. There was a small blog blitz about the subject, which caused a small spike in traffic to the blog, which will probably just end up informing more people about the script. Current users will have a few small changes when they want to upgrade to the newest version, but it’s nothing that will take a huge amount of time. And since I was in Toronto at FITC when it happened, I had the chance to hang out with a few Adobe people and discuss the issue with them. They all agreed that it wasn’t really a good thing, but that there’s no reasoning with that feral beast that is the Adobe Legal Team®™.

I do, however, have concerns for other open source projects out there with the word “Flash” in the name. For them, changing names may not be so easy.

As for an update on the entire “using the word Flash” situation, Adobe (I’m told) is working on a response to everything, so hopefully in the next couple of weeks we’ll get a more comprehensive official statement from them that will clarify any outstanding questions.

Download SWFObject now.

UPDATE: As always, you’ll probably get a faster response to your support questions if you join and mail the SWFObject mailing list instead of mailing me directly.

FlashObject to become SWFObject

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A couple of months ago I was asked by Adobe to write an article about FlashObject for their Devnet site. I happily agreed, as the Devnet site is pretty high visibility in the Flash community, and it would really get the word out about FlashObject.

So I wrote the article – nothing too spectacular, just a spiffed up version of the existing FlashObject page. Then I waited. Then came a very odd e-mail: their legal department didn’t like that I used the word “Flash” in the project name, and asked if I would be averse to changing it. Well, I’m not really attached to the name, so I considered it for a bit, but decided that changing the name would be too much hassle, especially since so many people are already using the script and it’s gained quite a word of mouth following. So I imagined that all the people that know about it would hear all about this new great script called SWFObject and think it was some new thing. I can see the conversation now. “No thanks, I don’t need to use SWFObject, I already use FlashObject, and it’s just fine.”

Well I asked Adobe to compromise, and possibly give me permission to use the Flash name. I offered to place a little tag-line along with all the information about it, something like “Flash is a registered trademark of the Adobe Corporation, used with permission.” (Or something like that, you get the point).

Well, a few weeks have gone by, and tonight I finally got the response back: No deal. Apparently Adobe is really clamping down on the people using the word “Flash” in their projects, even if they are open source. I’m not sure how this will affect other projects, or Flash communities (My guess is that communities like OSFlash and Flashcoders will be fine, but anything that distributes a product with the name “Flash” will need to change – but this is just a guess).

Needless to say, I’m slightly annoyed by all of this, but in the end it shouldn’t really affect the project all that much (I hope). Soooo starting immediately, and as I find time to update the documentation and code downloads, FlashObject is now known as SWFObject.* I’ll be updating the main page to redirect to http://blog.deconcept.com/swfobject/ in the next day or so. If you have links pointing to the old page, feel free to update the links and change your link text/other info to SWFObject.

* I’m not really a huge fan of the name SWFObject, but I want to keep the ‘Object’ part in there to at least keep some semblance of recognition in there for the users who are already using the script, or have already heard about it. I also hate when people pronounce SWF as “swiff”, but since this is the internet, it will be hard to force people to call it S.W.F. Object. And that takes more time to say than “S.W.F. Object” anyway. So feel free to call it “Swiff Object” when talking about it “in real life.”

UPDATE (4-27-2006): John Dowdell posted a bit more info about this on his blog. Go read the Adobe Trademark guidelines.

FlashObject Breeze presentation

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I gave a presentation to the Minnesota Flash Users Group last night all about FlashObject and the benefits of using it. It went really well aside from my technical issues – When I first logged in, it worked fine, but after I adjusted my microphone, my browser crashed and then wouldn’t work at all after that. Firefox and Safari both would just hang when I tried to log in to the breeze room.

I ended up switching to my new Intel Mac Mini at the list minute and presented on that. But I guess Adobe hasn’t updated the Breeze screen sharing plugin to support the Intel macs yet, so I was stuck copy/pasting code into the whiteboard. I think it still turned out pretty well, so if you are new to FlashObject, this presentation might be a good overview of the advantages of using it.

You can view the presentation here. Enjoy! And thanks to the Minnesota User Group for asking me to present.

Today is ActiveX Black Tuesday

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Today Microsoft will release their ‘Active Content’ patch for Internet Explorer 6. From a recent blog post on the MS Security Response Center:

The second issue is that we have a number of security vulnerabilities in IE that are scheduled to be addressed in our next release of security bulletins on Tuesday April 11, 2006. As you know, in order to reduce the complexity of updates and to improve quality, we ship all IE updates as cumulative updates. As a result, the April security updates will include the non-security ActiveX change to respond to the Eolas case.

If you’ve been following this at all since back in December, you’ll already know that you can use FlashObject to get around these changes and your users won’t need to ‘activate’ anything. But for those of you who are new to this issue, you can read an old blog post of mine that covers all the details and links out to all the important sites you might need to check out. It also covers a small bug in the update that I’m hoping has been fixed in this latest release (the script debugging issue).

Hope everyone enjoys the update!