Adobe recently release Flash Player 10.1 on labs. It has many outstanding new features and I’m excited to start playing around with it. However, since I’m on Mac OS X, there’s one very big issue. There’s no debug version of the 10.1 player to download.
The lack of a debug player for Windows users is not too big of a deal since the installer comes in the IE plugin flavor and the Netscape plugin flavor. For us developers this means we can use one browser for 10.1 and the others for debugging our work targeted at older player releases.
For us Mac users we get one plugin installer. This means to play with 10.1 we have to get by without a debug player. For those of us that write Flash Player applications as our job, this is simply not an option.
So…rather than living without a debug player or living without playing with Flash Player 10.1 I figured out a way to have my debug and 10.1 too. Thanks a ton to Sephiroth for building a really useful Firefox plugin, the Flash Switcher!
Using the Flash Switcher, I can install 10.1 globally on my system. Then if I want to debug a pre-10.1 application I’m working on I can use Firefox to switch to the version 10 debug player using Flash Switcher. The other beneficial side effect is when you switch it in Firefox any browser should also get switched, for instance, Safari.
Here’s the steps I took to make this a reality:
1. First you are going to want to uninstall Flash Player from your system. Once you’ve downloaded the uninstaller make sure to close all your browsers. Here’s the link to the uninstaller: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/141/tn_14157.html
2. Next, you will want to install the Flash Player 10 Debug Player. Once again, after you download the installer you will need to close all browsers. Here’s the link to the installer: http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html#fp10
3. The next step is to open Firefox and go to Sephiroth’s page to install Flash Switcher. Here’s the link to that: http://www.sephiroth.it/firefox/flash_switcher/#install
4. Once you’ve installed the Flash Switcher, you will want to save Flash Player 10 Debug Player in the Flash Switcher as a cached version of the Flash Player. I suggest watching the 45 second tutorial on how to do this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iINoAaKB64
5. Next, you are going to want to uninstall the Flash Player 10 Debug Player. Don’t worry, if you cached it in step #4 you’ll still have it. So, uninstall Flash Player from your system. Once you’ve downloaded the uninstaller make sure to close all your browsers. Here’s the link to the uninstaller: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/141/tn_14157.html
6. Now it’s time to install the Flash Player 10.1 Player. Once again, after you download the installer you will need to close all browsers. Here’s the link to the installer: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html
7. Now save Flash Player 10.1 as a cached version of Flash Player in Flash Switcher. If you didn’t in step 4, suggest watching the 45 second tutorial on how to do this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iINoAaKB64
8. At this point if you try to use Flash Switcher to switch between the two versions of the Flash Player, Firefox will throw errors such as Access Denied and File Already Exists. (At least I did) To get around this, you must uninstall Flash Player 10.1 and rely on the cached versions of Flash Player 10.1 and Flash Player 10 Debug in your Flash Switcher. So, uninstall Flash Player from your system. Once you’ve downloaded the uninstaller make sure to close all your browsers. Here’s the link to the uninstaller: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/141/tn_14157.html
You should now be able to switch back and forth between 10.1 and the version 10 debug player. One thing I noticed, is you’re going to want to close your other browsers such as Safari before switching otherwise the Flash Switcher won’t be able to switch the player version. It may by why I got the issues before step 8, but hey, this was supposed to be a 5 minute blog post, I’m busy with billable work, and too lazy to retest and revise.
Finally, if you want to test the switching with an app in Flash Builder 4, you can run this simple Flex 4 app after each switch. It spits out the player version and whether it’s a debugger or not. This download is a zip file containing an FXP export of the Flex 4 Project: http://www.iheartair.com/samples/CodeZips/TestingFP10FlashSwitcher.fxp.zip