New Flash Player and Smart Notebook 11.4?

[PCSDMacTech23]

Anyone else, out there, having issues with Smart Notebook version 11.4 files, with flash embedding?

Since the latest two versions of Flash Player updates, we have noticed (on Macs) the Smart Notebook files, that have flash embedding, crash immediately.

This was not an issue, last school year, a couple months ago, with the slightly older version of Flash Player...(current at "that" time).

We have many Music/Art teachers, here, in my district...that have this issue, now, as of recent.  Anyone have a fix, or is Adobe aware of this?  I could not find any posted issues with this, and when I tried to contact Adobe's chat...they referred me to this...  Any help would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks!

[_maria_]

Hi,

We reached out to the developers of Smart Notebook.  Their reply:

The latest version of SMART Notebook, 16.1, contains a fix for this. This can be downloaded from www.smarttech.com/notebook.

--

Maria

[PCSDMacTech23]

This isn't a fix, for our situation. It involves updates that cause worse issues, in our environment.

Sent from Jerry Staub

[_maria_]

What are the other issues?  The vendor states they have fixed the issue in a newer version of their product.  Have you contacted them for assistance?

[PCSDMacTech23]

Newer version of Smart requires a newer version of Mac OS. The newer version of OS is having wireless issues, shares that are broken, and keychains that pop up constantly. I have a case open with Apple, for these items...if those are fixed, I can entertain it, to a point. We are licensed for 11.4. All other platforms, Windows included, work just fine with 11.4. The only thing that has "broken" the 11.4 version, is the newer 22.xxxxxxx and 23.xxxxxxx versions of Flash Player on the Macs. Rolling the Macs back to older version 21.0.0.242 the Smart Notebook 11.4 software with Flash embedded files works just fine. However, this causes website issues with Flash being older. Is there something new, in the coding, of the newer 22 and 23 Flash Player versions...that is causing this? I narrowed it down to this, after a week of heavy testing. Their fix, is to use the newer version of their software. This then is more licensing money and a newer OS, to fix a plugin for Flash based files. Nothing else is wrong, but this...with their program only on Mac OS.

Yes, I contacted them, as well. They said if we cannot go to their latest version, which btw 11.3, 11.4, 12.4, and 15.1 also have the same issues with Flash, on the Macs...with version 22 and 23 of Flash Player, to contact Adobe. Adobe support said to ask in Forums and Bug Reports. So here I am... I am just trying to look out for the best interests of my teachers/students, and clones/budgets. Hoping for a simple fix...it's not looking that way, though. Thanks for the responses...I like you are looking.

Jerry Staub, ACSP, MCP

[chris.campbell]

Hi Jerry,

Thank you for the reply and I appreciate your situation.  This issue derives from a security change that we made earlier this summer.  Our fix was in full compliance with how browsers return window location values, but unforutnately SMART wasn't providing some crucial information when returning information from these API's.  This is what's causing the crashes your teachers are seeing.  SMART appears to have been an outlier as we haven't heard of any other non-browser embedding crashes.

We worked with SMART engineers, and as soon as they understood the issue, they updated their application accordingly.  I'm not sure why SMART forwarded you along to Adobe given the history of this issue.  I think your only options at this point are:

1. Get SMART to publish a hotfix for your particular version which includes this change

2. Update to the latest version of SMART

3. Revert Flash Player back to an insecure version (not recommended).

I'm sorry I don't have better options for you.

Chris