Why is the Flash Player Global Settings Manager (GSM I’ll call it) still the same as it’s been a couple of years now? Anyone that creates Flash content that I’ve ever talked to about the GSM says it’s bad. I think even someone from Adobe (Macromedia at the time) agreed, in a diplomatic way of course.

The GSM actually has this text below the Flash content:

Note: The Settings Manager that you see above is not an image; it is the actual Settings Manager itself. Click the tabs to see different panels, and click the options in the panels to change your Adobe Flash Player settings.

This reminds me of an eMail newsletter I received one time that contained an offer for a book on usability. The image below is from the eMail (I love the irony):

If you have to explain something or give another option …

The GSM should be a Flash SWF, not several on different pages. I realize Adobe has their reasons for doing it this way, like deep-linking issues, but that’s another rant.

Even if the GSM stayed on separate pages, it should be a LOT smarter. Probably the only reason you go to this page is because you’ve clicked on something from the SWF you were just at.

In my case I ran a SWF in the standalone player that was published for Local access only and it tried to load a file from a web server. The Flash Player 8 security dialog that appears tells you:

To let this application communicate with the Internet, click Settings.

When you do that you are brought to this page. When you get there you are presented with … nothing different than if you got there by clicking the above link.

That’s dumb. Now if the SWF didn’t have a clue that the user got there via a security dialog, then maybe I could understand. But the SWF knows. How do I know it knows? (… sounds like a quote from Mystery Men, hehe …) When you eventually figure out that you need to take action yourself and click the Edit locations… combobox, and click Add location, the dialog that appears provides a link to the file that caused the trip to the GSM in the first place. Great, so I just hit Confirm? No. You have to browser to the file, or copy and paste the location and then click Confirm.

Ugh.

I don’t know exactly why Adobe decided to centralize the settings like this, since another Settings dialog within the Flash Player would have sufficed. One reason might be for SWFs that are too small, but they don’t display a Settings dialog in the first place so local settings can’t be set from them. I would have assumed having the GSM centralized would give Adobe power to make changes and enhancements more easily, however it hasn’t changed, suffering from MANY usability issues, not just the ones I mentioned here.

Come on Adobe, please fix this. It looks bad and it is barely usable. Experience matters, right?

Edit - Also, if you leave the security dialog up long enough the Flash Player script timeout dialog will appear.