Ryan Stewart has an excelent post about installing FlashPlayer 10 beta on your Mac and use the Firefox Flash Switcher extension to be able to switch back and forth between versions.

I tried on XP and ended up in two hours of browser/plugin hell. And just when I was about to give up everything started working. Here’s what I found:

• The ESPN and CNN sites don’t like the FlashPlayer 10 beta. You get a message in place of the content to install the missing plugin. At least that’s what happened for their video players.
• I couldn’t get Flash Switcher to work properly with Firefox 2.x. so I upgraded to FF 3beta.
• Here’s the real pisser: When I tried to install Flash Switcher in FF 2.x it was disabled by default because it was incompatible. So when I upgraded FF to 3beta and installed Flash Switcher it was disabled by default as a holdover from the preferences from FF 2.x. I mistook the disabled for incompatible. (Note: disabled extensions are grayed out. Incompatible extensions grayed out and get a little red-exclamation mark. I failed to notice the difference the first time.)
• It’s hard as hell to find the Flash Player plugin file on WinXP. Not that you actually need it because Flash Switcher will take care of that for you if everything is set up correctly. So I waisted a good 20 minutes finding it: C:\WINDOWS\system32\Macromed\Flash\NPSWF32.dll. Note: that’s the Macromed folder, not the Macromedia folder which is right next to it.
• Buzzword doesn’t support Firefox 3beta but there’s a link at the bottom of the page that opens Buzzword in an unsupported browser and it seems to work fine for me.
• The Google Toolbar doesn’t work in FF3beta. Nor does All-in-one Gestures. But never fear: The Googlebar Lite and FireGestures work just as well in their place.

I started out thinking I’d take good notes on how I did all this but when things got fraked I lost track. So lets call this a suggested process. Like Ryan said, “your milage may vary.”

1. Download the Flash Player uninstaller
2. Download the Flash Player 10 beta
3. Download the Flash Switcher for Firefox
4. If necessary install Firefox 3 beta.
5. Uninstall Flash Player
6. Install Flash Player 10
7. Now when you click on Flash Switcher - probably in the bottom-right of your browser - it should show at the top of the menu something like “Save Flash 10…” You want to do that.
8. Done, now you can switch back and forth between Player versions - which restarts Firefox.

That’s great but what about the debugger? There is no debug version of the Flash Player 10 beta. If you’re using Firefox as your primary browser then I highly recommend using IE for debugging. Because you can crash IE all you want - and it happens a few times a day just because it’s made by Microsoft. But who cares? It doesn’t take all your open tabs with it.

So jump over here and get the Flash Player debug version for IE - it’s the first download below Adobe Flash Player 9 — Debugger Versions (aka debug players or content debuggers) for Flex and Flash Developers. You can install it without even closing Firefox so you don’t have to worry about plugin conflicts.

Now that I spent my morning getting this crap to work I don’t have time to actually make any Flash 10 content. Maybe tomorrow.

The first time I installed Firefox 3beta I couldn’t get Flash Switcher to work because I didn’t pay close attention to the disabled plugin state. Because many of my favorite extensions don’t work in FF3beta I decided to go back to FF2.x. I reinstalled it and started up. It crashed right off the bat. Okay, start again - crash. Start in safemode with everything set back to defaults and all plugins disabled - crash. Reboot PC and start FF - crash. Are we noticing a pattern here? So I had to reinstall FF3beta because FF2.x won’t start for me anymore. I guess it’s true: you can never go home again and you can never revert to an earlier version of software. :-)

Note: I have submitted a bug for this at the Adobe Flash player bug/feature request site where you can vote on it. If/when I hear something back I’ll be certain to share it here.

Since installing the latest release of the Flash player - 9,0,115,0 - I’ve noticed some strange behavior regarding the audio portion of videos. Specifically, everything works normally but every few days I’ll go to watch a video and the audio is gone. I restart the browser and the audio/video work perfectly.

I’m using FireFox 2.0.0.11 on WinXP. I haven’t tested this on IE because it takes a few days for this to happen and I can’t bear to use IE for that long. :-)

I did a Google search on the matter and nothing popped out at me. I’d like to see if anyone else has this issue before reporting a bug.

It seems as though the post I wrote about the NFL.com switching to Flash video has become the de facto support page for people having trouble watching their videos. There are 30 comments so far mostly about people having trouble getting the videos to play. Even some of the NFL.com developers have commented there.

A few readers who have reported issues found that they were able get everything working properly by shutting down McAfee security. Here’s what a reader reported:

If you have comcast w/ the McAfee security here’s how to fix it. Click “Internet and network” click “configure” on the right side. Under web browsing protection click “advanced”. Simply uncheck the “block advertisements” box and hit apply.

I haven’t had any issues myself but I don’t have McAfee security. From what I’ve been able to piece together the issue lies with the communication between the HTML navigation and the Flash video player they built.

If you’re having trouble then hopefully this will take care of it.

While doing a prototype for a usability study I was asked to customize the context menu when a user right-clicked on a specific button. No problem except one of the custom menu options they wanted was “Delete”.

Everything worked in the context menu as you might expect except everything after the “Delete” was, well, deleted. And it wouldn’t display the “Delete” either. I kept checking my code to see if there was some silent failure I wasn’t seeing and then it occurred to me, “Maybe it doesn’t like the word “Delete”.

Sure enough, that was it. Change “Delete” to anything else and it works.

Below is the code that I used: ( download source )

I had some images given to me that were going to be loaded at run-time in Flash. No problem. I’ve done that hundreds of times. But this time I got some weirdness that took a while to figure out.

Here’s the image in standard RGB:

Nothing wrong there.

Now here’s the same image using CMYK.

One thing you might notice is that it’s much darker than the RGB, unless your browser corrects for it. It’s also WAY bigger in file size. The top image is only 13k. The same in CMYK is 587. I’ve never worked in CMYK so this is all new to me.

Now here’s the really strange part.

This is a screen capture of the image after it was imported in Flash.
WTF? So this is what I saw when I loaded the images. I went to the artist who saved these images out and noticed the CMYK on the titlebar in Photoshop.

So, if you ever get something like this you know what caused it.