Gareth Jones

After upgrading to Flash player 11.1 this week (11.1.102.55 to be exact) I noticed that a number of my games and applications were no longer displaying correctly. The screen would either be blank on startup or after a couple of button presses, and after that point right-clicking on the stage would present me with a “movie not loaded” message and not much else.

At first I thought that Adobe had simply dropped the ball again. It wouldn’t be the first time, let’s be honest.

I considered reverting back to a previous player version but of course that wouldn’t solve the problem for everyone else who is using my applications so I decided instead to investigate.

One of the applications that was affected was a personalised video messenger I’ve just finished for a major UK greetings card company. The strange thing was that the application would work on some screens when it was in normal mode, but not at all when it was in debug mode. The only difference between debug mode and normal mode was that for the benefit of the non-technical staff at the card company the application would output its traces to a text field at the bottom of the screen. No other logic was different so naturally my first thought was that it was related to dynamic text fields or maybe an embedded font issue.

After some messing around it turned out that it wasn’t the text field or the embedded font at all. In fact in turns out that Flash player 11.1 is happy with all of that stuff: until you run the SWF through SWF Protector 3. At that point the SWF again either refuses to work at all or refuses to work on screens that use dynamic text fields. For every Flash player version prior to 11.1 the SWF works fine so I can only assume that either there is a bug in 11.1 that SWF Protector 3 exposes or Adobe has deliberately changed something that happens to trip up this particular obfuscator.

So, I’ve had to consign SWF Protector 3 to the bin and am now using Kindi SecureSWF which, although technically a more secure product isn’t as user-friendly as there is no batch import of SWFs and no option to have the protected file over-write the original. I’m actually hoping the next Flash player resumes its compatibility with SWF Protector 3, but with SWF Protector 4 due out for PC any minute now there is also hope that DCOMsoft can resolve the problem themselves.

Among the many new features announced in Flash CS5 is iPhone support. Adobe claims that the new version of Flash will be able to compile native iPhone applications that don’t need the Flash player. Apple prevents the iPhone from running Flash so that its users can’t play Flash games for free and instead need to buy non-Flash versions from its store, so this is in theory a great feature.

As I said it sounds great in theory, but I am concerned that perhaps they’re spending too much time chasing headlines instead of spending their time on fixing the stability issues with the Flash IDE. Flash CS3 was buggy and crashed often – Flash CS4 is worse. CS4 even crashed at the pre-launch demonstration that I attended in Manchester earlier in the year, and the Adobe rep asked everyone to please forget what they just saw. What he should have said was to get used to that screen because as CS4 users you’d be seeing it a lot.

I really hope Adobe doesn’t mess this one up because having iPhone development available in an environment that so many people are already familiar with – and one that DOESN’T crash every 30 seconds – would be great and would lower the barrier of entry to iPhone development even further, which would naturally result in even more applications and games finding their way to the platform.