SlideShowPro News

04.03.08 | Permalink problems explained. Important changes ahead.

Lately there have been reports of issues when using the permalinks option in SlideShowPro for Flash. The problems stem from two factors unrelated to the component itself, but important nonetheless. First, there's a bug in the latest version of Flash Player 9 (9.0.115.0) for Internet Explorer on Windows that prevents javascript communication between SWFs and HTML (with AS that doesn't use ExternalInterface -- more on that in a minute). Two, in another IE related problem, SWFObject 2.0 -- the popular javascript method for embedding SWFs -- has issues when using VBScript, which is part of the process for how permalinks are used in IE.

Now, both of these problems are related to the fact that SlideShowPro for Flash's method for using permalinks dates back to Flash Player 7, before Macromedia made Flash/Javascript communication easier with their ExternalInterface class in Flash Player 8. It's precisely these old-school ways of communicating with Javascript that's causing both of these issues.

We could wait and see if Adobe fixes this problem in the next build to Flash Player 9, but if history is any indication (been doing this longer than I'd care to admit), this holds a good chance of not being resolved; especially since Adobe has been making numerous security/scripting changes to Flash Player 9 lately, and I doubt they'll be in the mood to open holes to allow outdated code to work.

With that, the next point update to SlideShowPro for Flash will get rid of the old school way and support ExternalInterface instead, which will cut out a bunch of unnecessary code and make permalinks easier to deploy. The downside though is that users of Flash MX 2004 will not be able to use permalinks. They will only work when published from Flash 8 or Flash CS3.

But as we've mentioned before with the updated transition styles, the vast majority of people these days are using Flash 8 or newer, so it's a change that shouldn't affect that many people.

So if you're having permalink problems, hold tight. A fix is on the way soon.