Us at Zmags are excited to share that over the course of fall 2020, we have been behind the scenes upgrading Publicator to become a completely Flash-free platform ahead of Adobe’s scheduled retiring of Flash in Jan 2021. You may have some questions regarding exactly what this means for you and your existing Publications, how this will affect your workflow going forward, etc. We hope this article will answer all your questions, but if there’s anything not covered here please reach out to your account manager or send an email to support@zmags.com and we’ll be happy to assist.
Table of Contents
Project Overview Webinar
If you’d prefer the video version of this update, we recently hosted a 20-minute webinar and brief Q&A session detailing all of this information:
https://zmags.zoom.us/webinar/register/1015977866897/WN_pxucP52uQM2Pf1sH84DHjw
Release Timeline
Release #1 – September 22nd 2020 (Full release notes)
The primary purpose of this release was to remove the ability to create new Flash content in Publicator, and retire some functionality related to that. We advise reading the full release notes, because while this release did not affect any already-existing Publications, something in your workflow may have changed.
Release #2 – Scheduled for Tuesday, October 28th 2020 (Full release notes)
This will enable a new Enrichments Editor in your account. Currently, the Enrichments editor is a Flash-based tool (in fact, it’s now the last part of Publicator to run on Flash). With this release, you will no longer need to allow Flash on your browser to work in Publicator!
The new Enrichments editor will appear alongside the existing Enrichments editor, and both will be operable until the upcoming release in December 2020 that will remove the old Flash-based Enrichments editor. We recommend acclimating to the new Enrichments editor as you feel comfortable to prepare for the change, and kindly ask that you report any feedback or bugs to the Zmags Support team (support@zmags.com) so that we can investigate and address them as timely as possible.
Future Releases
There will be 2 more releases this year following the September & October releases.
- Release #3 will be a release to patch known bugs (some of which listed in the next section below), as well as other issues as they’re identified or reported. This release will be in mid-November, and full release notes will be published here in the Publicator Announcements section when the release is finalized.
- Release #4 will be the final release of 2020 in early December. This release will remove access to the existing Flash-based Enrichments editor and resolve any high-priority issues with the new Enrichments editor.
IMPORTANT NOTE: On January 1st, 2021 Adobe officially ends their support of Flash, along with modern browsers (Chrome, Safari, etc.) who’ve already began to phase out Flash content. Once this change takes effect, Flash content will not render online at all. Meaning, it will be virtually impossible for readers to access any Publications still utilizing a Flash viewer.
As of Sep 22nd Publicator users can no longer create new Flash content, but before January 1st you should ensure that any Publications still utilizing a Flash viewer are switched to an HTML5 viewer. If you’re unsure if there are Flash viewer Publications in your account, please reach out to your account manager or support@zmags.com for assistance. As well, this video demonstrates how to change & customize a Publication’s viewer to HTML5 in just a few steps.
Known Issues
Since Release #1, we have been collecting feedback and identifying usability improvements, as well working to repair bugs and issues that have surfaced since the release. If you’ve encountered something of this nature that isn’t noted below, please let your account manager or support@zmags.com know as soon as possible.
- The Navigation window zoom is not available
- The last used opacity setting for any new widget/link should be saved for future widgets
- Double-page spreads do not correctly appear in Heatmap analytics