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UPDATE - As of April 13, 2006, Microsoft has included this patch in the ‘critical updates’ section of WindowsUpdate, so the adoption rate of this patch is very likely to soar.

It is important to start updating your Flash embedding technique as Microsofts’ patch 912945, which limits initial interaction with ActiveX plugins in Internet Explorer 6, will be more and more common in the future and will be included by default in Internet Explorer 7.

Why does Microsoft release such a patch, as it only seems to hinder user interaction with well known (and trusted) plugins such as Flash, QuickTime, Windows Media Player, RealPlayer and Sun Java? It all comes down to the EOLAS patent, a legal affair between Microsoft on one side and the University of California and its licensee Eolas Technologies Inc on the other.

The patent describes a technique to embed programs in hypertext documents, much like data is embedded in HTML. The patent also says that no user interaction is required to start using the embedded program. This is exactly what the <object> tag does and that’s what Eoloas sues Microsoft for.

The patch released by Microsoft alters the way Internet Explorer handles embedded programs such as Flash Player and Quicktime. What happens is that user interaction with the embedded object is switched ‘off’ by default. A gray border and an explanatory tooltip appear when the user hovers the mouse over the object. After clicking the object, interaction is enabled:

In the two screenshots above I have illustrated the effect of this change. The top image shows a Flash movie embedded in an HTML page. The next image shows the gray border and the tooltip that appear.

The remedy to this is simple: the patent says the object has to be embedded inline in the document. This means that embedding the document through an external (Java)script is a perfectly legal way to circumvent the claims made by University of California and Eolas Technologies Inc. When you embed plugins through an external script, Internet Explorer will not show the gray border and tooltip, but will enable the plugin immediately instead and let it behave like we’re used to.

I highly recommend using Geoff Stearns’ FlashObject SWFObject to embed your Flash content with in your HTML documents. It’s not just an Eolas-proof and XHTML valid method, it’s also a very elegant and clean solution, which I have been using for quite some time now and very much to my satisfaction. Geoff wrote a similar Javascript to embed Quicktime, as did Apple.

Yesterday, Emma Thompson launched the online Anne Frank Tree, a project Lost Boys and Unit32 have been working on in close collaboration. At the website, you can visit the chestnut tree Anne wrote about in her diary online and leave your own leaf.

The project is partly Flash, partly HTML. In the Flash part you see the tree from below, as if lying on your back. The branches and leafs are gently rocking in the wind, giving the whole a distinct and serene atmosphere.

From the website (or perhaps more appropriate: monument):

Anne Frank often looked from the attic window at the chestnut tree behind the secret annex. She wrote about it in her diary. Now the more than 150 year old tree is diseased, but online it will live on. Leave your leaf in the virtual chestnut tree, forward it and keep Anne Frank’s ideals alive.
[...]
Anne wanted be useful to others after the war. Not only to the people around her, but also to people she did not know. Anne did not survive the Holocaust but her diary has inspired millions of people all over the world to do their best for a better world. Anne’s wish came true after all.
[...]
With your leaf you can show that you too have been inspired by the diary of Anne Frank.

Head over to the Anne Frank Tree and leave your leaf. And while you’re there, you might want to give the screensaver a try as well.

At last, Adobe updated the Flash Player Version penetration page on their website, something I’ve been waiting for basically ever since Player 8 was released…

I need these numbers to convince clients, co-workers and management to develop Flash Player 8 projects and it looks like Flash Player 8 is being adopted quite fast, which is excellent news!

The Flash Player 8 numbers come down to this:

• US - 45.2%
• Canada - 56%
• Europe - 55.1%
• Asia - n/a

Unfortunately, there are no numbers avaialble for Asia yet, but if you are developing for Europe, Canada or the US you now have something to rely on, apart from your own measurements of course.

This is awesome: Edwin van Rijkom and Lennart Kats have released a plugin today which allows you to create and build Screenweaver project from within Eclipse!

This means that you will no longer have to start a seperate application to convert your SWF to a Windows app, it can all be done from the Eclipse environment. Another nice addition is the new SWX file format used by the commandline compiler. This file format is in plain XML, so other apps will also be able to read and write Screenweaver project files.

It basically comes down to this:

• Install the commandline compiler (and some more)
• Install the Eclipse plugin
• Tell the plugin where to look for the compiler
• Done!

Head over to this page for detailed instructions.

I’ve recently started exploring Nicolas Cannasse’s latest innovation: haXe. You can work with this new programming language in Eclipse using the HXDT plugin. I’ve been working on some basic build settings to enable easy compilation of haXe projects from within Eclipse.

If you’re new to haXe, I recommend you check out the official website first.

Next, what software do you need to get to know haXe using Eclipse?

• haXE (the haXe compiler)
• Eclipse (the editor we all love)
• HXDT (haXe plugin for Eclipse)

After installing these apps (I’m not going into the details in this article, it’s all pretty straightforward), the first thing that came to my attention was the fact that the HXDT plugin doesn’t (yet) support haXe compiler integration. That means that you cannot click ‘Run’ or ‘Debug’ and have HXDT instruct haXe to compile your project and run it for you.

You will need to make a seperate External Tools > Program profile in Eclipse for each haXe project you will be creating with HXDT to get this to work. I will share my settings here, perhaps they come in handy when you start playing around with haXe. Click the thumbnail on the left to see the settings I’m using.

I have included the last line (the ‘Arguments line’) for easy copy-paste below. Note that the -main Hello part refers to my main class file, you have to change that setting to reflect your project.

There’s one thing I haven’t yet done: automatically launch the .swf file that is generated with this task. Perhaps it would be possible to do that using ANT, but I haven’t had time to figue that part out yet.

By the way, the guys working on HXDT recently posted a nice list of improvements for HXDT version 0.2.0, including compiler integration, making this solution obsolete. Until then, this solution may streamline your workflow with haXe a bit.

I’m excited to be given the opportunity to speak at Spark Europe, the Flash conference that is to be held next week in Amsterdam. I’ll be doing a joined session together with Ralph Hauwert, which is going to be a lot of fun.

Our topic will be “Advanced Expressiveness for Flash Developers”. We aim to show ways for ActionScript programmers to be as expressive with the new Flash release as designers can be, but through means of ActionScript of course. We will discuss and show many of the new (graphic) capabilities of the Flash 8 Player, but we may also venture into the exciting new grounds of AS3 / Flash Player 8.5.

Looking forward to meeting you at Spark!

It took a while, but I finally found some time to upload the pictures I took during te MAX 2005 Conference in Anaheim, California. Some of them were taken with my phone, so the quality of those pics may be a bit low. Anyway, enjoy!

My personal favourite is one of the slides Gary Grossman showed during his talk on the new 8.5 player. Imagine, new MovieClip() instead of our old friend createEmptyMovieClip()… wohoo!

If you have your own Flickr set or perhaps even movies of some of the sessions, please leave a comment with the url to your pictures or videos, I would love to see some of the sessions again.