Jul 1, 2008 11:33 pm
If you're a Flash developer and have upgraded to Firefox 3, you've probably noticed that the Flashtracer extension hasn't been updated yet to support it. After a few minutes of exploring, I found a simple solution to get it to work again.
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Find the Flashtracer install.rdf file,which is located in your Firefox profile folder. If you're on a Mac, it should be:
/Users//Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles//extensions/{22832dda-1de6-4443-9ab5-d34214b03347}/install.rdf
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Open the file in a text editor and change line 14:
<em:maxVersion>3.0b3<em:maxVersion>
to:
<em:maxVersion>3.0.*<em:maxVersion>
That's it.... just a few characters in an xml file. Restart Firefox, and you should be able to launch Flashtracer again!
Oct 4, 2007 10:28 pm
Wow, has it been a long time since my last post. A lot has happened since then.
First things first, I started a new job! I left the friendly confines of Tribal DDB and the lucrative world of advertising, and accepted a job as a Flash Developer with Yahoo! here in Dallas. I've just completed my first month there, and everything is going great so far. Everybody I work with is super smart, and everyone is good at what they do. I definitely feel like I am going to learn a lot. My fooseball skills should improve as well....
I do miss all the wonderful folks at Tribal though, and wish them all the best.
Secondly, the flash world is really abuzz right now, especially since all the sneak previews of the next version of the Flash player and IDE. Object based timeline, C/C++ integration (?!?!), native 3D, Hydra, rigging....wow. Add to that H.264 support, and you have a ton to be excited about my friend. The Flash dev team at Adobe has been hard at work, and it shows.
Jun 16, 2007 9:35 am
I don't know how I avoided it for so long, but I recently worked on my first project where I had to request data on a secure server from a non secure connection in flash. I had heard horror stories about trying to get this to work in the past, but it actually turned out to be rather simple, but with a few caveats. I specifically was using a web service on SSL, from my flash movie on a non secure location, but the following should hold true for any kind of data loading, like remoting, or just loading another swf.
The first thing to remember is the flash security model sees http://www.mysite.com and https://www.mysite.com as different domains. It will consider communciation between those two domains as cross-domain. I know, I know - duh....crossdomain.xml....but I often see an important part omitted. Each node in the crossdomain.xml file can have an attribute, "secure", that you can set to either true or false. Lets say that on your secure domain, you have a crossdomain.xml file. Even though you may have a wild card node in there (), this still denies permission to all unsecure domains. The wildcard by itself would allow access from all secure domains. To grant permission to all domains, secure or unsecure, you need another node - <allow-access-from domain="*" secure="false" />.
The second thing to take into consideration is the certificate on the secure server. This Adobe tech note explains the issue. It seems that the Flash player will not trust any self-signed certificates. This one is almost impossible to debug since its a silent failure. You will need to know from an administrator of the secure domain if their cert if self-signed or not.
So, after expecting a nightmare, the problem turned out to be a smiple cross-domain communication issue, with the "self-signed" caveat.
May 1, 2007 11:34 am
After reading some halfway interesting notes on Microsoft Silverlight this morning, I decided to see what the hype was all about. Upon visiting the the Silverlight site, and trying to view the demo, of course no installer or message of any kind popped up in my beloved Firefox. So I launched the same demo in IE, went through the runtime install process, and got this lovely error message:
I figured this was because I haven't yet installed IE 7, so I clicked on the "Get More Information" link to well, find out more information. When that link loaded, I got this gem:
Hmmm.....Silverlight could not be installed, yet installation completed successfully. At least they prefaced that first error message with the "Beta" banner in the corner. Also, contrary to the message, I did not have to restart my computer to view the demo after that.