Please Note: My personal journal is now fully independent of my main personal Web site, but I am still working on some things such as my new page designs and many improvements to PageDrive, my software that runs my journal site. If you encounter any technical problems, please either just try again a while later or let me know.
I just installed Adobe Flex Builder 3 and according to some already-checked check boxes, it was supposed to install a debug version of Flash Player for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. It seemed to have done so because a quick check via Firefox 3.0.1 showed version 9.0.115.0 of Flash Player installed—a version released after I bought Adobe Creative Suite 3 but before the current version, 9.0.124.0—but Flex Builder itself did not seem so sure as its start page seemed seemed unable to detect any version of Flash Player whatsoever:
The Flex Start Page requires the Adobe Flash Player. Please use the installers in the Flex Builder 3/Player/ folder to install the Adobe Flash Player into your default browser.
Hmm . . . strange, I thought. I tried installing the current version of Flash Player and again, Firefox worked fine, but Flex Builder just displayed the same message:
The Flex Start Page requires the Adobe Flash Player. Please use the installers in the Flex Builder 3/Player/ folder to install the Adobe Flash Player into your default browser.
The referenced folder does contain some executables of some sort: "FlashPlayer.exe", "Install Flash Player 9 ActiveX.exe", and "Install Flash Player 9 Plugin.exe". The first of those is described as "Adobe Flash Player 9.0 r115" and it appears to be some form of Flash Player itself rather than an installer while the installers are both marked as being for version 9.0.115.0, but none of that information seems useful in determining why Flex Builder 3 is unable to detect Flash Player.
I fired up Internet Explorer 7, which is never pleasant, and discovered that it did not seem to have any version of Flash Player installed despite multiple installation attempts. According to Adobe's "Version test for Adobe Flash Player" TechNote page, that is. According to Adobe's about page for Flash Player, though, version 9.0.115.0 is installed in Internet Explorer 7 despite me running the Flash Player 9.0.124.0 installer and its apparent success, both according to its own post-installation report and the fact that Firefox is running Flash Player 9.0.124.0 without issue. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
Perhaps uninstalling all things Flash Player then reinstalling Flash Player 9.0.124.0 will convince Internet Explorer 7 and Flex Builder 3 to recognize Flash Player. I'll try it, but in the meantime, I think Adobe Flex Builder 3 is stupid.
Update (1:00am): Uninstalling then reinstalling was not enough to get things working in Internet Explorer and Flex Builder, but almost. After accepting installation of the Flash Player ActiveX control when prompted by one of Adobe's pages, both Internet Explorer and Flex Builder started working. I still think Flex Builder 3 sucks, though, and I haven't even used it yet; its installer should have installed whatever it needed and failing that, it should have detected and reported its own failure then Flex Builder itself should have detected the failure of its installer and provided more information about its apparent dependence upon Internet Explorer. I would think by version 3 that Adobe could muster a better user experience than silent installer failure and two unhelpful lines of text without so much as a link to more information.
