Say good-bye to an old friend...

It's been long, very long. Instantly recognizable, a classic. And maybe a little old school at times. But we now say good bye to the button cursor in the Flash Player you have been grown accustomed to! Flash Player 8.5 will use the standard system cursor for buttons and links and adhere to system themes. Take a look, the new cursors are on the right side:



You may wonder why I write about something as mundane as this. But, I have seen a lot of content making use of the old cursor in their designs and changing this will affect the look and feel of Flash content in general. As Flash moves forward into the realm of full fledged RIAs it is important we blend into the rest of the web page as best as we can. Hence I took the lead on making this granted very simple change.

I hope you'll all go along with this.

Universal binaries

John Nack and Steve Kilisky layed out plans for universal binaries on the Mac. Any news concerning the Flash Player are absent there though, so let me talk a little about it.

The new iMacs ship with a native Intel version of the Flash Player 8 plugin and so will the MacBooks. These are currently not universal, meaning this binary runs on Intel only. We'll update this soon (I hope in a matter of weeks, although this depends on a number of factors) since you might have noticed that this version is not up to date revision wise. There were also a number of fixes since then you'll be able to enjoy, especially performance will be improved. You'll also see improved interoperatility with the native Intel version of FireFox, for the time being they had to add a workaround to make the plugin run. It's not yet clear how we will distribute it since eventually we want to ship one binary only. But stay tuned, we are currently working hard to get the last pieces of this puzzle together.

Another interesting question is if the current PowerPC Flash Player 8 plugin runs under Rosetta. It does pass our internal test suites, but performance wise it's lacking seriously and we have identified a couple of rendering bugs (especially with video), something which might be fixed with a software update of the Rosetta emulation engine by Apple.

As for Flash Player 8.5 alpha: While there is no univeral binary for this on labs.adobe.com so far, there is a version internally though which is maintained. I assume that most developers still own PowerPC machines, so the focus remains on the platforms on which users can give the most feedback when it comes to AS3.

Update: Yes, a fix for the blue text problem will be part of the update of the Intel version.