dirtystylus

While developing the recent AllStateGarage.com site I had to do regression testing on different versions of the Flash Player, to make sure that both the swfobject embedding script and the built-in ExpressInstall upgrade functionality were working properly. After doing a bit of searching I found Plugout, which in a brilliant twist of fate was written by Aaron Smith (the guy behind RubyAMF that we used on the AllstateGarage.com project).

Plugout is a command-line utility that makes switching to different versions of the flash player easy. You can specify the plugin, version number, and browser. It's smart enough to restart and run the browser under Rosetta if the plugin version is PPC-only. For example, to switch to Flash Player version 9.0.28 in Safari I fire up Terminal and run:

You can also add different plugin versions as they get released, including debugger versions of the plugin (the debugger versions are denoted by a "d" following the version number). For example:

The only wrinkle I ran into when using Plugout was that Ruby is required for it to work. This isn't a big deal to Leopard users, since Ruby is included, but before I upgraded to OS X 10.5 I just ran the plugout command in a shell session launched from within a Locomotive Ruby context. Speaking of Locomotive: development has been halted on the project, mostly because of Ruby's inclusion in OS X Leopard.