This was posted to alt.macromedia.flash by the people at Timberfish.com the other day, thought it might be interesing:
We are hosting a video chat session this Friday where we will discuss the newly released r40 and r47 versions of the Flash 6 player. The chat will be hosted by Robert Reinhardt, author of the Flash 5 and Flash MX Bible. For more information go to www.timberfish.com
A new Flash player was silently released by Macromedia in the beginning of this week. Whilst a silent release of a new player version is kind of new in the FLash 6 line of players - its still more of a back to the way it was with the Flash 5 players.
When I first heard about it, I thought -- OK, bug fixes and a few updates - no big deal and I guess its ok they are not making a lot of noise about it. But the information that Mike Chambers shared today made me think otherwise.
Its the removal of the Flash 6 players ability to accept redirects that makes me think Macromedia really should have made the information better available. I am sure that anyone that has gotten the new Flash 6 player update since the beginning of the week has been scratching their heads over broken sites.
A couple of sites/Flash applications that will not work with the new player includes:
Flash RSS Reader
Multiblog Flash RSS Reader
And I am sure a lot of other sites too. Macromedia claims that the problem is easily fixed with two primary solutions.
1. Proxy Script
2. Shim SWF
With the Proxy script, you will need to have access to the scripting technology. I know of several solutions on air today that will break, and lack the server technology to fix it with a proxy. The shim solution does not require any extra server capabilities, but require that you get the site that makes available the data you want to import to install the SWF for you on the server with the appropriate ActionScript settings.
Seems like an important change to me, or maybe I am just all too aware of the headaches this is going to give developers. I hope there was a good reason behind Macromedias decision to break the redirect capabilities in the player.
