Web Designer Magazine, Making a Robust Flash Player Detector, June 2004.

Overcoming the differences in Flash version, and creating a single player detector SWF that works for Flash players 4 on up to the latest version.

Often, we want to indicate to website visitors and users of our Flash applications what version of Flash player they currently have installed on their computer. The usual reason for this is to specify to the user when they don’t have an adequate version installed, and then redirect them to the Flash player download site. If we’ve spent months creating a killer Flash site with the latest version of Flash, then it’s important that people with anything less than the latest Flash player are told to upgrade – otherwise our site may not perform properly, and, even worse: it may appear broken.

One of the challenges is, paradoxically, that we must create this player detector so that it runs in Flash 4, 5, 6, 7 and beyond. We cannot create a detector that will not actually execute in the versions we want to detect. What this means is that we must create a detector that ultimately runs in the lowest common denominator, Flash 4. This means that many functions are off limits to us, levitra india. However, with a little bit of planning, and intelligent design we can make a cool detector that spans a stretch of four versions, and works the same in all.