Active Content Conflagaration

I downloaded and installed Flash CS3 today. It took nearly 2 hours to do both. The installation (on a Dell with WinXP, sadly) took what seemed like forever. The install included the Flash Video Encoder and a few other things. I noticed that Bridge gets installed too, even though the installer doesn't tell you that.

There's a lot to squawk about with this new release and in coming posts I'll talk specifically about them. There are still features that I wish Flash did have, but again that's another post.

As we Flashers know what a pain in the butt it has been to publish our movies with the Active Content template that was released shortly after Microsoft changed the way Internet Explorer intercepted active media elements - for security reasons. CS3 addresses this issue:

By default, the Publish command creates a Flash SWF file, an HTML document that inserts your Flash content in a browser window, and a JavaScript file labeled AC_OETags.js that lets your SWF file play automatically in active content-compliant browsers. The Publish command also creates and copies detection files for Macromedia Flash 4 from Adobe and later. If you change publish settings, Flash saves the changes with the document. After you create a publish profile, export it to use in other documents, or for others working on the same project to use.

Although this is a solution, you'll still need to put that .js file everywhere you have SWF's on your server. So it's a solution, but the real problem is with IE, or so it seems.