Stupid Macromedia Tricks

[unixronin]

We bought our kids some kindergarten skills books as part of their Christmas presents this year.  The books include an interactive learning CD.  The CD is implemented in Flash, and Pirate and Wen use a Power Mac with a G3 accelerator running OS9.1.

It turns out that the carbonlib in Mac OS9.1.5 is not new enough to run the version of Flash required for (and included on) the CD.  It also turns out that if this is the case, the Flash binary pops up a handy dialog giving you a URL at macromedia.com telling you where you can download an updated carbonlib.  So far, so good, right?

Here's the problem.  If you try to go to that URL on a Mac, and you have a carbonlib too old to run current Flash, you can't actually access it.  You can get to it fine using a PC.  But on a Mac, if you need it, you can't get to it; if you can get to it, you don't need it.

Bad Macromedia.  No donut.

(I solved the problem very simply; I went to that page on babylon5, followed the link to the carbonlib installer, downloaded it and put it on our local webserver.  I could then get to it without any trouble from the Mac.)

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Macromedia has always been stupid pant like that. It remains to be seen whether their acquisition by Adobe will help things or make them worse. Of course, after the whole Dmitry Sklyarov affair, my love for Adobe is about negative six zillion....

here's to sneaky end-arounds.

[olafthunderfoot.livejournal.com]

that's friggin retarded, i'm hopin you sent them an e-mail to complain about it?

[richspk.livejournal.com]

We know of one pretty cool guy who works at Macromedia, but with apologies to him, Macromedia is good at providing dubious features while really obfuscating basic useability. I'm really disliking the emerging trend of Flash video players (with .flv format video files).

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I think Flash is a good example of tool metastasis. Just because it CAN be extended to do yet another thing it wasn't originally intended to do, doesn't mean that it SHOULD be extended.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

We know someone who works there too. First name Eric, nickname Vanguard.

[richspk.livejournal.com]

Well, when I wrote "we," that was inclusive of you. :) I don't think I know Eric, but one of the NEDs of D (are you on that list, or just unixronin?) works at Macromedia.

Just him

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

I get it filtered through him. So the funny bits and the dinner invites are all I see.

Re: Just him

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

And not all of those, because I'm not really keeping up with the volume....