Brief Hands-On Report--Adobe updated Flash Player 9 to 9.0.64.0, Release Candidate

Adobe posted a Release Candidate of Flash Player 9 (9.0.64.) code-named Moviestar. According to Adobe, this Flash Player 9 Update contains several new features:

• Support for H.264 video and HE-AAC audio codecs (new Aug. 21).
  
• Enhancements to full-screen mode to use hardware scaling for improved video performance and quality on systems running ... Mac OS X 10.2 and newer.
  
• Faster rendering of vector graphics on multi-core CPUs.
  
• Higher quality and performance for downscaling large bitmaps (SWF 9 only).
  
• Support for caching common platform components, such as the Flex framework, to reduce average application sizes. This feature is enabled in the Flex 3 beta available on Adobe Labs.

Adobe Flash Player 9 Release Candidate (9.0.64.0) is available for download from this Adobe Web page. You can see what version you have installed by visiting this Adobe Flash Web page.

Note that Adobe recommends that you uninstall any previous version of Flash Player before installing the new beta version. Download the uninstaller from this Adobe Web page.

Adobe's release notes still include a few known issues but we encountered none with the previous beta of Flash Player 9. Its is not clear if any pertain to the Mac version:

• The Real Player 11 beta is known to cause issues with some Flash and Flex content. Content may fail to render, or the browser may crash. If you have Real Player 11 beta installed, please disable the add-on to ensure issues you encounter are with Flash Player and not the Real Player beta.
  
  • In Firefox, go to Tools->Add-ons and disable the "Real Player Browser Record Add-on."
    
  • In Internet Explorer, go to Tools->Internet Options->Programs->Manage Add-ons and disable the "RealPlayer Download and Record Plugin for Internet Explorer."
    
• Opera and Netscape do not allow recursive calls using the ExternalInterface API into the Flash Player. This issue has been reported to Opera and Netscape. (184777)
  
• If FlashPlayerTrust is mistakenly created as a file, the Flex profiler will crash. Please ensure FlashPlayerTrust is properly configured as a directory. (203879)

We had Flash Player 9.0.60.184, the previous beta of Flash Player 9, installed on our Macs so we uninstalled it on our 15" Mac Book Pro Core 2 Duo (LED) and PowerMac G4 Cube as recommended by Adobe. Then, we installed the beta (9.0.64.0) without any problems. And finally, we visited a number of Adobe Flash showcase sites to ensure it works well and it does.

We also installed the beta on our Mac mini Core Duo and aluminum iMac Core 2 Duo but without uninstalling the previous version first. It worked fine, too, when we visited showcase Web sites but we still suggest that you follow Adobe's recommendation to use the uninstaller first. [Bill Fox & Dana Baggett]