TechNote (Archived)

Shockwave Flash 1.1 Release Notes

The 1.1 version of Shockwave Flash adds new features, including ActiveX/LiveConnect scripting, an optional setting to disable the menu and optimized memory management. If you are using Windows, it is only necessary to upgrade if you wish to take advantage of LiveConnect scripting. We recommend that all Macintosh users upgrade, to take advantage of the memory management improvements.

Scripting

The most important new feature is support for a unified scripting interface that uses both Netscape LiveConnect and Microsoft ActiveX. The interface makes it possible to integrate your Flash animations and buttons with JavaScript or VBScript that is in HTML pages. The ActiveX version of Shockwave Flash has been enhanced to make it possible to write JavaScript code that supports both ActiveX and LiveConnect.

MENU Option

There is a new MENU=FALSE option that can be added to EMBED or OBJECT tag to disable the commands in the pop-up menu. This setting is useful for preventing users from accidentally stopping your animation in the middle of an animation sequence.

Relative URLs

Because of limitations in Netscape Navigators 2.0's support for relative URLs, it is important to always keep your SPL file in the same directory as the HTML page it appears on. With Shockwave Flash 1.0, relative URLs in a SPL file are relative to the URL of the SPL file. With ActiveX, relative URLs are relative the the HTML file that the SPL file is embedded in. This difference means that you must always keep your SPL in the same directory as the HTML file that references it. Also, the Macintosh version of Shockwave Flash 1.0 does not handle URLs of the form "../page.htm" properly. It is important to avoid using paths that link outside of the root folder. To eliminate these problems in the future, Shockwave Flash 1.1 uses a new feature in Netscape Navigator 3.0 to make relative URLs behave the same as they do with ActiveX. We do not recommend that you take advantage of this now because it only works if a user has both Navigator 3.0 and Shockwave Flash 1.1. However, in the future we think that this will be an important enhancement.

Memory Management

Shockwave Flash 1.1 has also optimized the way that it manages memory. This is particularly important with the Macintosh version. There was a conflict between Navigator's memory management strategy and Shockwave Flash's memory management strategy that could cause problems. As a side benefit to this work, all versions of Shockwave Flash now use even less memory than previous players.