define('DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT', true); May 2009 – unFocus Projects – Kevin Newman and Ken Newman

unFocus.FlashPlayerInfo update for Player 10

Adobe has updated their versioning system for Flash Player. This welcome change, creates a few backward compatibility problems with FlashPlayerInfo though, since the terms I applied to each version decimal place, do not match Adobe’s new terms (they are off by one place-ish, sorta).

To address these changes I added a new set of methods to check for the new “major”, “minor” and “bugfix” version numbers, for Flash Player 10+. The old methods will return the same data it does now (Version.MajorRevision.MinorRevision.BetaVersion). The new methods will not work for older Player versions of Flash Player (or at least won’t make sense), returning the data from the new format instead (MajorVersion.MinorVersion.BugfixVersion.build). In older players, getBugfixVersion would refer to “r” or third decimal place version number, which is what you used to look for when trying to detect something like r115. For older players you should continue to use the older getMinorRevision method. There should be no need to update your current detection routines, unless you need to target this new information. One change worth noting, will hopefully not be noticed – getVersion now returns both of MajorVersion and MinorVersion as a JavaScript Number, so that you can check against dot releases (getVersion() > 10.1). This should not affect backward compatibility.

In addition, for Flash Player 9, Adobe released 3 feature or compatibility breaking security updates with strange version names (update 3 was r115 for example, and was significant, adding H.264 and AAC support to the player). So for the special case of Player 9, I added getUpdateVersion. Since Player 9 was the only version to get the odd update versions, this really only applies to that version.

These changes also means that some of the old properties are probably useless in Player version 10+, such as the beta flags and beta version numbers, and getReleaseCode in IE. I used to infer that information from the 4th decimal place, which used to always be 0 except in beta and pre-release builds (based on my observation). In the new version number convention that 4th place is just a build number.

Here are the new methods:
[cc lang=’javascript’ ]unFocus.FlashPlayerInfo.getMajorVersion();
unFocus.FlashPlayerInfo.getMinorVersion();
unFocus.FlashPlayerInfo.getBugfixVersion();
unFocus.FlashPlayerInfo.getBuildNumber();[/cc]

The updated script is in SVN, and will be in the next release.

SwfHTML will probably get a similar update as well.