What happened to my text?!?

Question

For anyone having the problem where there static text does
not appear in their Flash 8 movie, Adobe's solution is to reencode
the movie in Flash 7 format.

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=144b4be2

My question is... how is this useful? If the blatant answer
is to force us, Flash developers, to encode movies in Flash 7
format rather than Flash 8 (or eventually Flash 9), then there is
no incentive for us to ever purchase or develop in a version of
Flash greater than Flash 7, because no one will be able to see the
movie clearly!!!

The user doesn’t get a warning or a prompt to download
Flash 8 automatically; they get a page with no text.

So, by Adobe’s admission – see the knowledge base
article – having any version of Flash greater than 7 is a
waste. You won’t be able to use any of the enhanced features,
because you still have to encode the movie in Flash 7 to see any
text.

Bootsified · Answer

The jump from Flash 7 to Flash 8 was much larger than usual, so there are more things to take into consideration. BUT, it's really no different than any other player update. Plugin updates are a fact of life that users have to accept, otherwise technology will never evolve. As a designer, you have two options:

1) Design all your stuff in the older player formats.

2) Use player detection (which you should be using anyway) and encourage users to upgrade to the proper plugin, if they don't already have it (I highly recommend SWFObject).

Don't get mad at Adobe. Every software company has to deal with plugin updates. It's a fact of life. Eventually, everyone will update their player and we can all live happily ever after.

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