Oscar Trelles

Flash Player 7 Redux

So, before becoming an ‘occasionally connected’ blogger during this month, I wanted to summarize what I’ve been finding in other blogs and mailing list, after the seventh major version of the Flash Player was released for test to the general public. I know of this information has been around, but my intention here is to put it in a nutshell for people not coming from Flash blogs aggregators.

Auto-update: I have updated my flash players twice (current built is 7.0.0.250) since I installed them, and it’s the coolest thing. I didn’t even had to close my browser windows to get it to work. The little Flash icon appeared in the status bar notifying me of the new version available, and then it was just a matter of seconds and a couple of clicks. Very cool.

Performance: At some level, everybody seems to experience faster and better performances. Some haven’t seen significant progress, but most of us are very pleased with the new performing speeds provided by the player. Perhaps application complexity has to do with the performance differences. For instance, XML parsing is where I have seen the greatest jump!

New Features: First of all, in order to try and use the new features of the Flash Player 7 with the movies you make with Flash MX, you need to unlock them. This can be achieved by changing the SWF header from 6 to 7. If don’t know how to do it manually, Mario Klingemann has put together an online tool that does the job. Alternatively, this other tool can be used offline, courtesy of (insert credits here). Finally, I just read that Peter Hall suggests making properties of class available to SWF6 with:

ASSetPropFlags(class.prototype, null, 0, 1024);

Anyway, here you can find a list of all the new objects available to the Flash Player 7. Now, let’s see some examples of the most discussed features:

Customized Context Menus: Example 1, Example 2.
IMG tag support in textfields: Example 1, Example 2.
Video Quality: Example.