FutureSplash Player 1.1

The 1.1 version of FutureSplash Player adds new scripting features, an option to disable the menu and memory management optimizations. If you are using Windows, you only need to upgrade if you want to take advantage of LiveConnect scripting. If you are using a Macintosh, we recommend that everyone upgrade to take advantage of the memory management improvements.

Scripting

The most important new feature is support for a unified scripting interface that uses Netscape LiveConnect and Microsoft ActiveX to enable you to integrate your FutureSplash animations and buttons with JavaScript or VBScript that is included in your HTML pages. The ActiveX verison of FutureSplash Player has been enhanced to make it possible to write JavaScript code that supports both ActiveX and LiveConnect. Try a scripting demo.

MENU Option

There is a new MENU=FALSE option that can be added to EMBED or OBJECT tag to disable the commands in the pop-up menu. This is useful when you don't want users to accidentally stop your animation in the middle of an animation sequence.

Relative URLs

Because of limitations in Netscape Navigators 2.0's support for relative URLs, it is important to always keep your .spl file in the same directory as the HTML page it appears on. With FutureSplash Player 1.0, relative URLs in a .spl file are relative to the URL of the .spl file. With ActiveX, relative URLs are relative the the HTML file that the SPL file is embeded in. This difference means that you should always keep your .spl in the same directory as the .htm file that references it. Also, the Macintosh version of FutureSplash Player 1.0 does not handle URLs of the form "../page.htm" properly so it is important to avoid these. To eliminate these problems in the future, FutureSplash Player 1.1 uses a new feature in Netscape Navigator 3.0 to make relative URLs behave the same as they do with ActiveX. We do not recommend that you take advantage of this now because it only works if a user have Navigator 3.0 and FutureSplash Player 1.1 but we think that this will be an important enhancement in the future.

Memory Management

FutureSplash Player 1.1 has also optimized the way that it manages memory. This is particulary important with the Macintosh version. There was a conflict between Navigator's memory management strategy and FutureSplash Player's memory management strategy that could cause problems. As a side benefit to this work, all versions of FutureSplash Player now use even less memory than they did before.