Flash Player update

UPDATE 2 :  The re-launch on 1/20 was still not 100% right, so we once again reverted to the previous version 2.7.7 while our Flash bad boy went back to school for some additional counseling.  We're now scheduled to roll out the new player on TUESDAY, JAN. 26th. We will be testing it as thoroughly as we possibly can and hope that's the end of this round.

UPDATE 1 :  On Tuesday 1/19 we installed an improved version of our custom Flash media player. Within an hour we uncovered two bugs that did not show up in our testing. One of them was minor, the other one was limiting our Prepaid Minutes users to 30 second samples. No way! 

We decided to roll back to the previous version of the player, fix the bugs and relaunch the new one, which we did on Wednesday afternoon 1/20.  We apologize for any inconvenience.

ORIGINAL MESSAGE :  This new version of the HOS custom Flash player fixes some minor issues and improves various aspects of normal operation. It should load automatically when you arrive at HOS.com.

Among the changes:

[1]    BANNER/PLAYER: When you arrive at HOS.com, the player displays our banner image full strength for 10 seconds, then changes to the "interactive" view (banner dimmed, controls visible) for another 10 seconds. If you don't interact with the player it then reverts to the full strength view (minimum text and controls). Anytime you move the cursor over the player, it immediately reveals the interactive view. After 10 seconds of inactivity, it will fade back to the full strength view again while you are playing music.

[2]    VOICEOVER ON/OFF (microphone) button now works anytime. Previously you had to make your choice while a program was actually running. Now you can press it anytime and it will toggle between on and off. As before, the player will save your choice when you log out and log back in.

[3]    IMAGE GALLERY LINK: We've added a visible text link for the new program's "Image Gallery." It's visible when the player is in the "operation" view. The gallery is a collection of 18 Flickr.com images that relate to the current week's program. There are thousands of awesome photographers posting millions of great images on Flickr. If you enjoy our banners, please take a moment to view the entire gallery and click through to view the "photostreams" of the source photographers.

[4]    SCROLLWHEEL SUPPORT: We've Improved support for scrollwheel operation on Macs. This was not working on some combinations of the Mac OS and browser, should be much improved now.

TO VERIFY PLAYER VERSION: Right click on the Flash player to see the version number. The current version is 2.7.7. If you see anything lower than this number your browser is holding on to an old version. Please click the "Reset" link at the upper left corner of the site. In the few cases where this doesn't work, You can clear your browser "cache" by following the instructions in our Help! section, or write to [email protected] for assistance.

:: SH

Comments

[Richard Mitnick]

Sounds good, just keep the wonderful music coming.

[Richard Mitnick]

Stephen, the captchs thingy worked in SeaMonkey. Now those guys are as good as H.O.S.

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[Greg]

No joy. My HOSPLAYER is stuck at 2.7.7, despite hitting Reset, purging cache, restarting IE, and rebooting the whole machine. (I'm on IE8 on Win7.) Running Flash 10,0,42,34. :-(