If you are building SWF10 content and discovered that your SWFs are no longer working with the refresh of Flash Player 10 beta that went live on Adobe Labs last week, you will need to download the latest compiler from the Adobe Open Source site. Build 3.1.0.2148 available on the FlexSDK open source site contains the compiler you will need to do the re-compile.

The reason why the re-compile is necessary is that we are making a change in how we differentiate the APIs for one version of Flash from another. Previously we used namespaces to make that distinction, but we are changing to a system based on metadata. It isn’t something that developers need to be concerned with, I just wanted to provide some insight.

Keep in mind as you do your re-compile that this is a beta, and some of the APIs have changed since the first beta post of Player on labs. A new version of the documentation also was posted last week, so make sure to download that as well.

Also note: There may be a prob or two doing Export Release in Builder with build 3.1.0.2148. the Flex team is looking into it and if needed will make updates in later SDK builds.

Adobe just announced the updated Flash Player penetration numbers. This includes the update on Flash Player update 3 (9.0.115.0) which went from 62% in March to 82% in June!

I admit that the 62% number both made me excited and made me nervous. 62% was way out of the norm even though our download and install data suggested the growth. Also, the data was gathered through a time-tested methodology for tracking Flash Player versions. When I got the 82% update I still felt relief followed by elation. This is a number that is consistent with the curve of 62% in 3 months.

But seriously, 82% in six months is fantastic. In our previous penetration models, that is where we expect our 9-month data to be. Besides the excitement this brings to me know that new features and security updates can penetrate fast, it is the knowlege that Flash Player cache, Hardware-scaled FullScreen, multi-core rendering, and H.264 are really out there at the levels that a lot of enterprises can make use of them. If you are developing for Flex 3, you can take full advantage of Flash Player 9 update 3 with 82% of users out there having the player.

Adobe’s announcement around SWF searchability was about using the power of the runtime as a replacement for the much less useful approach of parsing out static text and links from a SWF file. The parsing approach has been around for years, and if you are wondering if it was successful, ask any SEO expert what their opinion of Flash has been for the last few years.

Microsoft responded to the announcement saying their Silverlight content is searchable “too.” Their solution is the same as our old approach: search for strings in a static file. While I was expecting them to put an admirable spin on the solution that is available to them, I was not expecting them to believe that this approach is superior to runtime-enabled search.

No matter how elegant an application is, with all of its possible interactions and states it is a Rube Goldberg machine compared with the limited simplicity of plain HTML pages. Indexing the static content as Microsoft suggests is like trying to figure out what is going to happen with a Rube Goldberg machine by looking at a photo of all of the parts *before* they’ve been assembled. To really know what happens, you have to assemble the machine and let it run. That is what the version of Flash Player optimized for search engines does.

Indexing an RIA through the runtime means that you get the context of what text and links are being displayed at same point an application as well as knowing how hard or easy it was to get to that state. The real value though is that you get to do other runtime operations like load additional content.

One of the main ideas behind “web 2.0″ is data. Whether that is an RSS blog feed, a REST API query, or loading localized text, applications keep the interesting text separate from the application itself. Indexing the runtime means that you get static content, dynamic content and loaded content, which put another way, the search engine sees what the end-user sees.

While better than nothing, searching static content leaves the search engine with a disjointed view of the content because it lacks the ability to do dynamic operations like assembling a full URL from a base URL variable and a path variable. But as anyone that has done any level of SEO knows, indexing the right URL versus a close URL is the difference between customers finding your content and not.

As a final comment, I disliked Microsoft’s claim that XML makes an application inherently more searchable. For anyone writing a search engine that is parsing the file to find content, the difference between XML and an openly-documented binary tag structure is trivial. I especially dislike the claim since Silverlight 2 is moving to compiled DLLs that will actually obscure a lot of content.

Adobe just release a new version of Flash Player 10 beta (10.0.0.525). There are a few new things to talk about! In addition to the primary features, and all of the fixes and improvements requested by the community that made up the first beta, we’ve added a few more items that have repeatedly heard from customers about:

• limited fullScreen Keyboard support
• unloadAndStop
• Wmode support for Linux

Limited FullScreen keyboard access
Whether or not you want to make a game or a video player with keyboard shortcuts, the restriction of keyboard support in fullScreen has been an annoyance to a lot of developers. The restriction was placed there because of heightened possibilities of malicious attacks while in fullScreen mode such as password phishing.

In Flash Player 10 we are easing this restriction to allow non-printing keys to be used while in fullScreen. Non-printing keys are arrows, space, shift, tab and similar keys that can’t be used to provide private information. These keys are very important however to let users do many types of selection and gameplay inputs.

I’m looking forward to a whole new set of immersive games in Flash. I wish I just had more time to play them

unloadAndStop
Grant Skinner and several other in the community have rightly pointed out some issues Flash Player 9 has with unloading content where it remains accessible after unload and elements such as audio keep playing until the item is garbage collected. We’ve worked many members of the community to come up with a solution that knocks out the major issue.

Starting with Flash Player 10 you will now be able to use unloadAndStop to unload a loaded SWF and also remove references, stop audio and video and in every way possible just make it go away.

Wmode support for Linux
Starting last December, Adobe started shipping Linux Flash Player at the same time as Windows and Macintosh making it a first-class Flash Player. To continue that we needed to work on some areas of how Flash Player works with its hosting environment so that external factors like WMode support can also be consistent across the supported platforms. For more information on the Linux enhancements, read Mike Melanson’s blog post on the subject.

NOTE
If you have started developing SWF10 content, you will need to re-compile older SWF10 to work with the new player.