Flash-based screensavers generated with iScreensaver Designer 5 seem to have stopped working on macOS computers. I’ve tested it myself on macOS Mojave. During installation there’s a message saying “Flash plugin is not installed. Flash plugin version 27.0.0 is recommended. Update the Flash plugin?” even though version 32 is installed.
When running the screensaver there’s just a black screen with a similar message stating the Flash plugin needs to be updated.
Is there any hope for these Flash-based screensavers, now that you’ve completely dropped SWF support in v6?
Sorry, unfortunately the answer is “no.”
As you have discovered, the Adobe (Macromedia) Flash plugin does not work with apps on macOS 10.14 Mojave, and thus it is not available to iScreensaver Designer 5.
Adobe Flash Player has an End-Of-Life date of 31 December 2020, as officially announced by Adobe in 2017: https://theblog.adobe.com/adobe-flash-update/
However, other OS and Browser makers are not waiting until that date, and are removing or limiting the Flash player sooner.
Bottom line: if you want to use SWF/Flash content, your only choice is to stay with older OSs. Even then, there’s no guarantee it will continue to funcation after 2020.
That’s too bad, but understandable.
However, the screensavers used to work just fine on Mojave. It wasn’t until several days ago that they stopped working. This seems to coincide with the latest update to Flash, released on September 10, which fixes a critical security flaw. The patch only broke the screensavers on Mac, though – on Windows they still work, which seems a little odd.
That’s a good point - we just tested with Flash 32.0 on maOS 10.14.6, and it’s not working, like you say. Do you know what Flash Player version you had before you upgraded?
Sorry for the delay, I wasn’t notified of the new reply.
Just now I uninstalled 32.0.0.255 and then installed 32.0.0.223, and the screensavers work. Updating to 255 breaks it again, so it seems clear that’s the culprit.
Thanks for the info - this sounds like an Apple / Adobe problem at the moement, so I’m not sure if we can do anything to help
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That makes sense. Seems unlikely they’ll fix it, but fingers crossed.
Any plans for supporting HTML5 animations? I understand the video/animations engine uses HTML5, but HTML5 animations/webpages don’t seem to be supported as sources themselves.
(Did get the notification this time, maybe something went wrong on my end last time.)
iScreensaver 6 has a new feature which supports GLTF (GLB) models, which are full 3D models that can have complex animation tracks as well. We are using the GLTF 2.0 format which at the present time is somewhat experimental - many features work just fine, but iScreensaver 6 only supports a subset of GLTF features, and animation tools often don’t always support GLTF properly.
See https://iscreensaver.com/gltf.shtml for more information.
At the current time, we recommend using Blender http://blender.org but there are other options.
Although Adobe Flash doesn’t support GLTF export, some other Adobe products are beginning to add the feature.
Examples:
I happened to be looking into that today, but I’m a web developer, not a 3D artist, so it went a bit above my head. I’ll ask a friend more knowledgeable on this to explore the possibilities with me. From what I gather, though, certain logic-based features of the current Flash screensavers (like a clock or countdown for example) would not be transferable to that new format, so this would be for new screensavers only. HTML canvas would perhaps be more flexible in that regard.