SwfHTML – unFocus Projects – Kevin Newman and Ken Newman

The forums are back!

Kevin Newman — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:38:57 +0000

I got a suggestion that unfocus.com needs forums (well, forum). So just for fun, I thought I’d dig up the old archive, and see if I could get it to work. And it did! Pretty easily too. You will have to register to post, since I can’t get the anonymous plugin to work yet – … Continue reading

MIT License for unFocus.History Keeper

Kevin Newman — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:06:28 +0000

I have decided that LGPL is overkill for a tiny project like unFocus.HistoryKeeper (and friends) – so I changed it to MIT. LGPL would have been a pain for anyone selling or using a commercial product with history keeper, and I really don’t think the code is substantial enough to be such a headache. But now that’s not a problem! MIT is a better fit I think.

The change has already been reflected on the Google Code page, and in the newest release archive.

unFocus.History Keeper 2.0 (and SwfHTML) Beta 4 – Out Now!

Kevin Newman — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 06:16:23 +0000

A brand spanking new Beta 4 of unFocus.History Keeper is out, and ready for download! Download it from Google Code. (If you are wondering what happened to Beta 3 – I actually rolled that update about half way, and had it sitting in SVN for a while, but I never made the archive, or release notification.)

Sloppy change log:

– Fixed Flash Player 10 PlugIn detection.
– Changed license to MIT
– Quick and dirty temp IE8 support (makes IE8 use the timer method).
– removed ObjectPatentMagic
– added Packed library files for Beta 4 (says RC1 in SVN, but I changed my mind, there’s more I’d like to add).
– Added svn:keywords to most files.
– Updated tests for EventManager, FlashPlayerInfo, HistoryKeeper, SwfHTML and SwfShim.
– removed WebTV code, since the entire FlashPlayerInfo script doesn’t work in WebTV anyway.
– Fixed Issue 5. Added methods for major, minor and bugfix versions, to reflect changes to the convention in Flash Player 10 – Also cleaned up issues releated to the changes in IE.
– Added getUpdateVersion for the special case Flash Player 9 updates.
– Quick fix for shimMode on SwfShim.
– Fixes IE support.
– Adds shimMode property (it’s off by default).
– Fixed typo in call to get initial hash value (deep link), which broke it.
– Updates to the HistoryKeeper Actionscript 3.0 files. These changes are generally significant.
– Added asdocs comments (to AS3 files).
– Added support for Opera’s history.navigationMode.
– Made IE8 Hack detection more robust, and IE detectin simpler.
– Initial commit of Actionscript HistoryKeeper and AS3->JS communication framework (really just an easier replacement for fscommand). All of this is pretty rough – vomit draft material.
– Some smaller code comment and formatting cleanups.
– removed problematic _createAnchor functionality. (Issue 6)
– updated IE version detect to be compatible with multi-digit versions.
– Reworked Error messages so that they make sense in FireBug and other Javascript consoles. Fixes Issue #3
– Added direct and gpu WMode values.
– Made value checking case insensitive.
– Added SVN keywords Revision and Date, and added text/javascript mime-type.
– Fixed SwfShim.

Enjoy!

unFocus.FlashPlayerInfo update for Player 10

Kevin Newman — Fri, 29 May 2009 06:37:50 +0000

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.

Quick Update – HistoryKeeper, SwfHTML, SwfShim

Kevin Newman — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 06:21:15 +0000

Just a quick post.

There have been a couple of fixes and changes that have gone into HistoryKeeper, SwfHTML and SwfShim that are now in the SVN trunk, as well as a few other issues that have been nailed down, and put into the issue tracker.

Among the fixes are finally a fix for the incorrect use of Javascript Errors in SwfHTML, as well as fixing the previously unfinished SwfShim.

Despite the fact that I can’t figure out how to pass flashvars from SwfShim to loaded AS3 based swfs, I’m still going to include it anyway, with a note about that caveat. It does solve some other issues, and adds an easy way to utilize ExpressInstall even if you are using html to embed the swf (rather than javascript). More on that in a future post.

I’ll also be cleaning house around the site, here and on google code. I’ve already removed some old lingering (and useless) ad stuff.

Also, since Microsoft removed the “click to activate” silliness, I went ahead and deprecated PatentMagic. It was buggy anyway.

Check back for more updates, and hopefully, an actual release!

A problem with Flash Player 10 version number and javascript detection

Kevin Newman — Fri, 16 May 2008 20:30:39 +0000

As you may have heard, Adobe recently released the first beta of Flash Player 10. It looks like unFocus.FlashPlayerInfo has been checking for single version digits, rather than multiple:
[cc lang=’javascript’ ]
_versionRaw.match(/Shockwave Flash (\d)\.(\d)/);
[/cc]
The fix is easy enough (I could swear I actually fixed this at one point too):
[cc lang=’javascript’ ]
_versionRaw.match(/Shockwave Flash (\d+)\.(\d+)/);
[/cc]
This problem doesn’t seem to be limited to just the unFocus Flash Detection script. I’ve seen other claims of failed Flash detection in other corners as well. I’d bet most of the problems are with the plugin detection scripts (Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc.) and not with the ActiveX detection scripts (Internet Explorer), since most of the plugin detection scripts out there are using string parsing techniques, and have probably not tested with multiple digit Flash versions (since there haven’t been any until now).

I’ll see about getting a release out soon. If anyone needs any help updating anything, feel free to leave a comment, or email me.

unFocus.History Keeper 2.0 (and SwfHTML) Beta 2 – Out Now!

Kevin Newman — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 06:22:05 +0000

unFocus.History Keeper 2.0 Beta 2 is now available for download.

Feel free to download, test and use the new beta. Here’s what’s new and fixed:

History.js – There was an odd error, from a mixed up function, keeping History Keeper from working at all in the last release. It was the first issue reported by someone other than myself (thanks shacky7!) and it’s been fixed.
FlashPlayerInfo.js – was throwing an error if there was no flash player installed at all in IE. It’s fixed.
FlashPlayerInfo.js – added more robust Flash Player 6 detection. It is impossible to check for some minor revision versions in Flash Player 6, because they crash IE if you do. It’s now possible, though, to check for 6.0r65, which is the first version to support Express Install.
FlashPlayerInfo.js – deprecated “.getPluginType()”, and replaced it with “.getPlayerType()” and made it actually work. To practice discipline, I left “.getPluginType()” since it’s improper to change the API after a beta release (it didn’t work before, so I’m sure no one is using it).
FlashPlayerInfo.js – Fixed beta and MinorRevision errors in ActiveX path.
SwfHTML.js – was producing a security warning in IE if used over https. It’s fixed.
Added a bunch of test files for each object, to help make sure stuff doesn’t break (that’s annoying), and more thoroughly test the various methods and features. It is almost, sorta like unit testing, if you kinda look at it sideways, in a mirror.
Added Object Patent Magic to the package.
Added SwfShim to the source (under javascript folder), but it’s not ready for prime time yet, and is not in the packed js file.
Added some example pages – but these are really just there to test to the packed files, at the moment. HistoryKeeper.html is a good place to start if you want to learn how to use History Keeper. I’ll update soon with some Flash examples.

Check out the updated project page for more info, or just skip straight to the download.

SwfHTML and FlashPlayerInfo, the extra stuff in History Keeper

Kevin Newman — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 22:51:10 +0000

Well I guess it’s not really hidden, as much as it’s a tag along to unFocus.History Keeper. I’ve had an interesting (to me anyway) battle in my own head about whether to even continue maintaining SwfHTML and it’s companions SwfCommunicator, and FlashPlayerInfo, since there are many solutions to the problems they address out there already (including ExternalInterface for SwfCommunicator, which is actually built right into Flash Player 8 and up). I even decided a while ago to just stop, and start using SwfObject, UFO, or the new SwfFix (just found that yesterday, looks good!), yet, they are still here and I’m still working on them.

SwfObject, and now SwfFix, are just too integrated for my taste, too monolithic. That is not meant to disparage the work that has gone into those projects, those projects are quite mature, well documented, and widely distributed. It’s just tha tI like my code certain way, and have bent over backwards to keep interdependency down in my scripts, in the name of modularity. This was done originally so that the history portion could be used in combination with other SwfEmbed techniques (like SwfObject) and used with other plugins (Ajax came later, but it works for that too!). Examples of that modularity – History Keeper doesn’t rely on SwfHTML, and SwfCommunicator doesn’t rely on SwfHTML, SwfHTML doesn’t rely on FlashPlayerInfo, which as well as Patent Magic don’t rely on anything. A few of the above rely on unFocus.EventManager, but that’s because the subscriber pattern is just so darn useful.

History Keeper would work nicely right along side SwfFix as well. Wouldn’t complain one bit.

Anyway, I just wanted to make a quick (re)introduction to these infrequently mentioned tools, even if they are in a bit of rough shape. For simplicity, I’ll lump them all under the category title SwfHTML (even though SwfCommunicator, or FlashPlayerInfo could all be used without the SwfHTML object pretty easily).

Check it out.