Results: Right Click
August 27th, 2007Hey everyone,
First of all I would like to thank everyone for their great feedback regarding the Right-Click project. I have received thousands (!!!) of feedback emails with your browser data which helped me to better understand the different browser compatibility issues.
The mostly incompatible platforms for now are:
- Opera (all OS)
- Firefox 2 (Linux)
- Firefox 2 Russian
- Safari 2 (OS X)
There are also incompatibilities with almost all mouse-gesture browser plugins and specific mouse software running outside browser. These plugins capture mouse events using the browser’s JS engine and often fail to pass them on to HTML correctly.
I would also like to note that first click inside Flash Player does not generate the event. This is not a bug! it is required for IE browser to start capturing mouse events correctly. Without this safeguard the mouse event would fire at last known mouse position inside Flash Player, which is in most cases somewhere near the Flash/HTML border and it can produce unwanted results.
Script’s success rate is 86%. I think this is pretty good for a very basic Javacript hack, but yet far from perfect.
Once again I want to clarify that by contributing my time to this project I did not meant to “customize the Flash menu” or “sabotage the Flash Player” but instead I wanted to be able to use the right-click event in Actionscript 3 natively for creative purposes (for ex. RTS games where left-click selects units and right-click dispatches orders). In the world of multitouch interfaces we are still tied to a single click in Flash Player and I would like to be able to change that. However, I want to turn this project a in a little bit different direction and kindly ask you to contribute to the discussion in the comments.
What do you think?:
- Can you think of a cool scenario (website, application or game) that uses right-click events in Flash?
- Do you as a developer need right-click events in Flash Player and how would you use it?
- Do you think this technology will be abused? How and why?
- What do Adobe’s minds think about this?
Thank you.
August 28th, 2007 at 1:14 am
In answer to the first two points, the first thing that comes to mind for me is that right click would be useful for mind-mapping and drawing applications. Things like scrapblog.com etc
I do think this technology would be exploited by phising scams however. I know that the context menu can be changed through other technologies, but Flash has a great security record, and I think there will be plenty of people keen to benefit from that.
August 28th, 2007 at 1:49 am
Useful scenarios: I think it would open up the entire RIA field to better usability. Currently we don’t think of the context-menu as being useful for any webpage, Flash/Flex or HTML. With this someone could create a color-picker menu or a host of other possibilities.
I do think that the public would have to be educated. It isn’t really discoverable because, as I mentioned, no one expects it to provide anything useful.
Obviously this could be abused because someone could use this to duplicate the default look of the context-menu and make the “About Flash Player…” pop off to some unauthorized site. But off hand I can’t think of any way for someone to make money off that so why bother.
I hope Adobe sees that Flash/Flex developers would seriously like to have access to create custom context-menus and would then give us the control to do so without this workaround.
I’d like to say again that the community owes Uza a huge debt of gratitude for all this effort.
August 28th, 2007 at 7:21 pm
Hello,
Right click support is very important to Adobe and something we have been improving for years now for Flash Player. Here is some context from the reply I left at Ajaxian.
The Flash Player context menu has been customizable for years, and many people use this already (but not enough). You can turn off the “zoom” options and all the other defaults except the “About Flash Player” default. This one is mandatory because it is how the end user can reach their privacy settings. You can also create any new contextual menus that you like. This is well documented here: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/2/langref/flash/ui/ContextMenu.html
Kevin’s post here can give you a lot more background and an example: http://blog.kevinhoyt.org/2007/01/11/flex-2-context-menus/
HTH,
David
Adobe
August 29th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
David,
Thank you for your answer.
Do you think it is possible that future Flash Player versions will change the current privacy settings model and will allow full usage of right click event? (For ex. Java JRE has little taskbar icon that allows changing settings and accessing console).
September 4th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
[...] Paulius Uza has run an extensive user test on the right-click code and concludes that the code is reliable 86% of the time across the major [...]
July 8th, 2008 at 11:00 am
It must be very cool for the images : right-click on an image then “Save as…”, “Send to a friend”, etc… !
February 19th, 2010 at 11:29 pm
Very Interesting Read! Looking forward to more on this subject Bookmarked your blog. Was just curious if anybody could point me to some related material. Thanks in advance.
June 1st, 2010 at 12:30 am
[...] usando botão direito no FLEX http://www.uza.lt/blog/2007/08/results-right-click/ [...]