Adobe recently released the heavily anticipated Flash Player 10.1. This release had a lot of attention which I believe may speed up the adoption rate in the short term. This is important for Xcelsius developers because there are a few items that we have found that may impact your deployments. If you are interested, here is some additional information about Flash Player 10.
PowerPoint and Flash Player 10.1- If you embed an Xcelsius SWF inside PowerPoint, it only will work on your own PC and not on machines with previous versions of Flash Player. PowerPoint uses an ActiveX controller to run Flash player and for some reason version 10.1 will not render content from previous versions of Flash player in PPT. The symptom is a PPT slide that displays as a white box during presentation mode. If you right click on the object, you can still see the Flash Player dialog box, but no content. There are two known solutions:
1: Do not embed your SWFs in PPT
2: Revert back to Flash player 10.0.x
SWF Performance and Flash Player 10.1- I have not noticed any real performance gains in Flash Player 10.1 and Xcelsius. A new feature with Flash Player 10.1 improves memory and power usage, so if you have large SWF files greater than 2 MB, there is a chance that clients running Flash player 10.1 may not run anymore.
If you experience any more issues or gains from Flash Player 10.1, let me know and I will add them to the post. For those of you who want to revert back without digging through the Adobe web site, I have provided the download here: Download Flash Player 10.0
Good solution! Flash Player 10.1, improved features looks great, Thanks for shareing this post……….
Thank you for sharing this info with everyone Manfred. This is very helpful.
Adobe will be releasing a fix in next quarterly update:
https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-4843
“While we’re unable to comment on ship dates for upcoming releases, we do recognize the importance of this fix and its effect on these applications. The fix will be included in our next scheduled quarterly release (10.1.x).”
I made the mistake of using the Adobe Flash uninstaller, which removes the Flash ActiveX control as well as the player. Don’t try this at home, it will break Xcelsius. But if you do, download/install install_flash_player_10_active_x.msi to get it back.
I followed the link in Ryan’s article and downloaded Flash Player 10.0 and now cannot view my own PowerPoint files from Xcelsius. Is it the player or the ActiveX that is generating the swf? Does the ActiveX need to be downgraded to 10.0 as well? My Flash Player Plugin is 10.0, but the Flash Player ActiveX is 10.1. Seems like the ActiveX MSI for 10.0 may be needed??
Thanks.
Everything talks about reverting back to 10.0.x but no instructions.
If you try to revert back, you get an error that a new version exists and the installation is aborted.
“If you try to revert back, you get an error that a new version exists and the installation is aborted.”
That’s right, the newer version registers in the registry that it exists, then the old one refuses. You need to delete the versions in the registry before re-installing the older version. (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Macromedia\FlashPlayer\SafeVersions)
For whatever reason, Adobe frequently does not like you to upgrade from a .zip file not on their website. I recommend that to revert to 10.0, first uninstall 10.1. Then, go to http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/142/tn_14266.html to grab an appropriate archived version.
Looks like Adobe has a fix now, with the latest version being Version 10,1,82,76.
Download latest version here:
http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/
I tried uninstalling 10.1 and re-installing 10.0. The system won’t let me, Now what?
Ryan – As always, thanks for an excellent article. You helped us resolve an issue with a large dashboard deployment which stopped loading large SWFs (> 2MB) after 10.1.53.64 upgrade.
From my experience, it is the ActiveX control that is needed for Xcelsius dashboards to run inside a browser. Flash Player itself is not required. Uninstalling the newer versions via Flash uninstaller and then installing the 10.0.x versions Ryan provided fixed the issues for us.
I was able to disable automatic updates of Flash Player via Global Notification Settings on http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager05.html. Question, is there an automatic update of the ActiveX control and if so how can that be disabled?
one work around I found for PowerPoint is to use a free PPT add-in called “LiveWeb” (http://skp.mvps.org/liveweb.htm) and embed the xcelsius SWF that way.
Just install the add-in and insert a webpage. For the URL just type in the file name of the swf (example.swf) and as long as the add-in is installed and the SWF is in the same folder as the presentation it all works