tfabris | Do you know the way to San Jose?

Do you know the way to San Jose?

After missing the convention last year, we're heading back to Baycon this weekend, with a 9pm Saturday concert and a big bag of albums to sell.

Vixy is also heading down early to do some recording for upcoming album projects by The Bohnhoffs and Seanan.

We've recently sent some CDs off to IndieRhythm.com to see how they do for us. Our page there isn't up yet, but perhaps it will be up by the end of the week. In the meantime, CDBaby has been great, Thirteen is continuing to sell reasonably well through their online store, which makes us very happy. And the sales are coming from all over the world! We knew we could sell the album to a few local friends at conventions and housefilks, but I didn't predict so many sales from places we'd never been or people we'd never met before. We've gotten reports that folks are buying our album through iTunes, which makes us happy as well, although we get no tracking data from them.

Finally, I'd like to post a call for help. In the process of setting up our music page, I uncovered a bug in the Adobe Flash Player Plugin. I'm very keen on getting this bug fixed, so that I don't have to continue to modify my Javascript work-around each time they release a new version of the Flash player. I've reported this bug to Adobe; they have an online community system where the bugs get voted upon. Here's where I need help: my bug needs more votes before Adobe will even take a look at it, it's still classified in the "not enough votes" category. If you are of a technical bent, you can help by signing up for their online bug submission system, logging in, and then voting for my bug by clicking on the "Vote" link in the left hand column. Of course, I don't want to spam their system without a reasonable reason, so only vote if you've read the bug description, understand it, and agree it's something that needs fixing in the next release.

Edit: After getting enough votes to push the issue up the Adobe food chain, it appears as though their beta of Flash Player 10 fixes the issue. I hadn't realized until now that Flash Player 10 was publicly available, otherwise I would have tried it right away.

Vixy & Tony's Schedule
GeekHackFilk.com

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Hey tonyyyy I have no advice for you just comments.

BLAH I WISH I COULDS GO TO BAYCON >.<

Have a great great really great time!

We shall!

*hugs*

I'm wondering if the better solution, rather than getting everyone to bow to that monstrosity they built down on Fremont and 34th, might be to try for a version-independent workaround? I understand (though disagree with) the desire to use Flash as a nearly-ubiquitous plugin, but perhaps there is a way to come up with something simple that looks decent and will continue to work no matter what kind of shenannigans Adobe thinks to pull?

(I'll be happy to help beta test any new designs you come up with; I have access to Firefox, Opera, and Amaya, to help you test multi-browser compatibility....)

Hey, I happen to be sitting within said monstrosity on Fremont and 34th right now. My company leases space in the building. I happen to like it very much, particularly the location, which is extremely convenient for my morning commute. And the company I work for is wonderful. Still doesn't give me the power to walk into Adobe's offices and prod them about the Flash bug. I don't even know if they have anyone in this building working on Flash. Although you've given me the idea of emailing the assignee and asking if he works in this building, then I could demo it for him specifically.

And regarding the version-independent workaround: I spent, literally, weeks trying various work-arounds, not all of which were publicly visible. I am 100 percent satisfied that I currently have the best possible solution in place that meets all of my criteria.

Finally, my call for bug votes has nothing to do with my work-arounds, or even my web site specifically. For example, if you look at the bug description closely, I link another musician's page at CDBaby which is affected by the bug, simply by virtue of the fact that he published an album with more than 15 songs on it. You will also see two other duplicate entries in the bugbase, which I've cross-linked in comments, where others are experiencing the same problem, and they're using Flash for something completely different than I am. The simple fact is, Adobe has introduced a regression in Flash Player 9 build 115, the regression is not by design, it's clearly demonstrable, and it needs to be fixed, whether or not I implement a work-around, or even whether or not I use Flash at all.

By the way, the work-around I have in place is as follows:
- If you don't have Flash installed, or
- You are running on the bugged platform with one of the two bugged flash versions, then
- Show a button that lets you download and play the file instead of playing through Flash.
- Otherwise let it play with the Flash buttons.

This seems to work perfectly in a wide range of browsers and versions I've tried. I think it's the best possible solution.

Does this work even if the user also has Javascript turned off?

No, but that's not one of my criteria. It's my belief that if someone is browsing a web page and looking for multimedia content and audio content, they can't blame me if they can't play the media because they crippled the browser.

I could understand wanting to browse pages for text with Javascript turned off. But when you throw stuff like plaback of inline audio and video into the equation, deactivating Javascript locks you out of most of the multimedia content on the web.

And those who deactivate Javascript to prevent ads and poups have much better options these days.

I gotta agree with you about AdBlockPlus+Filterset.G... although I'm also running Flashblock until I'm sure they've got a Linux package up for it that isn't DDOS-vulnerable...

Hey, WRT your workaround: Could you not code something like:

if ((flash) and (flash.version < buggy)) then do_my_flash_thingy() else do_workaround();

And then when they fix it,
If (flash) and ((flash.version < buggy.low) or (flash.version > buggy.high))

Of course, I'm assuming that the Flash version number can be rendered numeric or at least less-than-greater-than comparable... and I know diddly about Javascript and if comparators can be overloaded or how to extract a plugin's version number. But if I could do it that way, that's how I would do it, instead of trying to enumerate bad versions... this way you'll only have to write this thing twice, once now and once when they finally fix it.

Let me know if I'm making sense; you've already said you're not the only one with this problem, and it's interesting enough I'd like to at least understand it if not grok it. The time when I may be more of a webslinger than I am now may not be too far off.

Yes, if they do not fix the bug on the next release, my plan all along has been to rewrite my code the way you show in your first example. If they take a couple more releases to fix the bug, then I would need to rewrite it the way you gave in the second example. The parsing and greater-than-less-than code gets tricky because you have to take major, minor, and build numbers into account, but it's do-able.

My hope is that they simply fix it now, so that I don't need to rewrite a thing. Maybe if we generate enough votes in their bugbase, they will.

Turns out it's been fixed already in beta 10, which I didn't know existed until now.

So I think the work-around I've implemented can just stay in place as-is.

Most of the time I leave javascript and flash on because there are, regrettably, too many sites that need them, but if I want a browser that's fast and light on its feet I'll run lynx or dillo, neither of which runs javascript at all.

Lynx or the equivalent is also what a blind person will run.

Thinking about it with sufficient caffeine in my system, I realized that it's trivial to make it work under all circumstances; it may be what you're doing anyway:

1. The plain HTML page links to the download URLs. These will always work, as long as the user has a suitable plugin or helper app.

2. Javascript checks to see if flash is enabled and updated to the correct version, and replaces the download links with the player if it makes sense. If javascript isn't enabled, the plain HTML still works.

I considered that, and I deliberately did the opposite.

The way I implemented it, for those running a regular browser with Javascript disabled, they would still either get the flash buttons, or they would get the prompt to install the flash plugin. This is what I wanted. It's my one concession to having the site browsed by limited or deliberately crippled browsers.

I've done a lot of work with multiple browser detection across varying platforms, and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that there's no universal solution that satisfies every possible browser situation *and* is aesthetically pleasing. I think I've done what I set out to do, and in my tests, it looks I've covered the most important bases. I could, for example, try to test browsers old enough so that they don't support the DIV tag, or don't support CSS. But I decided that aesthetics for the majority of viewers was more important than compatibility with an extreme minority of viewers.

By the way, for text-only browsers, both Lynx and Elinks work fine for downloading the MP3s. I just re-tested them to make sure. They prompt to grab the file and save it to the hard disk, as expected. You have to actually select "playbutton.gif" but it works and clearly shows the resulting file as audio/mpeg.

Reasonable compromise, given your goals. As long as text-only browsers work, I'd say that's good enough.

A little alt text would replace the "playbutton.gif", but that's really the only thing I'd change as far as lynx goes. I generally use [mp3]. BTW it also works perfectly in Dillo, which is my favorite no-frills graphical browser.

Edited 2008-05-20 20:14 (UTC)

I also deliberately left ALT text off of the buttons, because on some browsers, hovering over an ALT-ed graphic with the mouse pointer will cause an annoying little popup box. I hate that unless there's a specific need for the little popup box. I've done the annoying little popup box thing deliberately in other places on the web site, but those were specific and deliberate. Whereas, with those play buttons, on text-only browsers you can get meaning of the play buttons via context of neighboring text and they don't need the extra ALT text.

Ok...gotta say that I'm getting off on the geek talk from the guys with the guitars :-)"Six String Love" is one of my favorite songs on "Thirteen..."

Even if we're not talking *about* guitars? :-)

I'm somewhat indiscriminate about geek topics ;-) Although you and Steve (and technoshaman if he plays) are very welcome to discuss guitars.

I hope to be at your concert at Baycon, BTW.

Oh that's great! See you there!

Thanks for sharing the bug number. I recently implemented a similar XPSF setup on my own website but don't have Windows at home so I never tested.

Ah good, glad I could help. It's not a problem until you put about 14-15+ buttons on the same page, so it certainly doesn't affect everyone. The bad thing is that it seems to affect all of the MP3 players out there which implement themselves in that fashion.

If you don't care about the formatting of the page changing when you press play, the Delicious Player works around this by only implementing the flash file once, and using Javascript to feed individual MP3 links to the player. It's dead-easy to implement if you follow that link.

The only reason I didn't go with that solution was because their player rectangle changes its width and height when you press play. I wanted everything in a nice static unchanging table format where there was only the button and its shape/size didn't change. But if you don't care about that, then the delicious player is the way to go.

Yeah, like you, I didn't want my table resizing in the middle, and like some aesthetic control over the interface widget.

But it's good to know alternatives exist.

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