This is more a reminder for myself than anything, and to save others the half hour of grief I went through…

While setting up the Installation Incomplet at FitC, I ran into some trouble. The installation allows users to save an image of themselves playing with the experiments back to our server, and view it online, but this feature refused to work on location. I spent a stressful half hour testing everything I could think of (internet, connection to our server, etc), shuffling modified files between my powerbook and the installation PC on a USB key, before it dawned on me: It was a security sandbox error, but it wasn’t displaying any errors because I didn’t have the Flash IDE installed, just the Stand Alone player.

I remember reading about this from way back when, but it totally slipped my mind. The IDE installs a file that the player looks for to determine if it should throw (developer) errors – without this file, it just fails silently. To make things worse, all my testing had been in my experiments directory which is I’ve set up as a trusted location. Definitely something to remember if you’re deploying any Flash 8 content to other users’ local systems or doing any installation work.

Going to the advanced settings online and setting the installation SWF as a trusted file fixed things right up (although the spotty internet access largely defeated this feature in the end anyway *sigh*).