By Brad Daily | Posted Thursday, March 31, 2011 at 1:13 pm

Director updated, important note for JavaScript developers

We’ve released a small but important Director maintenance fix today, build 6411. It fixes a few things, including one particularly major issue that has been affecting Internet Explorer users.

Recently, a Flash Player update began causing problems in some versions of Internet Explorer — in some cases causing the page to hang for several seconds. The problem traced back to how SlideShowPro communicates with the Director JavaScript embed library. We’ve fixed that in this build, but in the course of doing so found something more. Even with the fix, there is a certain performance cost associated with the the SWF to JS communication. And considering a very small number of our users actually use that functionality, we’ve decided to disable it by default in Director’s embed code. The net effect for most of you will be that you should notice your slideshows loading a bit faster after updating to this build. For those of you who do use that functionality, you will need to make a small change to your embed code. You will need to add the useExternalInterface parameter to the flashvars section of your embed code, setting it to true:

useExternalInterface: true

If you are confused as to whether or not you need to make this change, take a look at this wiki document. If you have never made use of the functionality described there, you do not need to make the above change. In other words, if you are using the stock embed code copied from inside Director, you do not need to change anything.

The update is now available via the in-app update and the account center. All SlideShowPro.com accounts have already been updated.