Raymond Camden's ColdFusion Blog: Adobe Connect failure on the Mac

Adobe Connect failure on the Mac - apologies to the Connecticut UG

So - if you tried to attend my presentation tonight, you saw it was a complete and utter failure. Whenever Connect opened, all I saw was a blank white screen. I connected to my PC via RDP, went to the meeting, and confirmed it was working fine there, but no go on the Mac. I did a reboot and it didn't help. Finally one of the members suggested I load Connect in the browser with ?launcher=false.

Finally - I saw some UI. I was about to begin my presentation when I noticed that I didn't have the Presenter plugin. I've run Connect meetings all year long, but ok, whatever. I clicked. The app reloaded. No go. I tried in FF and Safari, and nothing seemed to change.

I'm very frustrated now - and of course more than a bit sorry that the Connecticut group didn't get to hear my presentation. Connect has been flakey on my Mac before - but mainly just random crashes 2-3 times an hour. I've never had a total failure like this before.

Can anyone offer any advice? I believe I still have a room open to me on one my accounts (oh, and while I'm complaining, has anyone else noticed it's hard to find the URL to the admin portion of Connect?) so I have a place where I can try.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13, 2008 at 5:35 PM. It was filed in the following categories: Adobe, Flash. It has been viewed 3,932 times and has 23 comments.

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Comment 1 written by barry.b on 13 May 2008, at 6:49 PM

Ray, I take it you're using Leopard and when using the Tiger OS you never had a hassle?
Comment 2 written by ron hiner on 13 May 2008, at 7:09 PM

Ray -- thanks for the herculean effort anyway. David cooked up some great pizza... and Jeff won ANOTHER t-shirt in the raffle.

How about we get you live and in person next time? Maybe there will be a t-shirt in it for you!

Thanks for trying!

Ron
Comment 3 written by Eric Hoffman on 13 May 2008, at 7:11 PM

It has been a miserable failure hosting Connect meetings under Leopard for us as well. I had to install Parallels/Windows just so I could run a meeting properly as I need.

Don't know of any fixes...if I share my browser, move the cursor too fast, it crashes. If I am slow, or busy yapping, it says alive a little longer.

I have removed and re-added it several times, so you are not alone.
Comment 4 written by justin on 13 May 2008, at 7:35 PM

So, did you try kicking it old school? Email the presentation and then talk over speakerphone?

By the way, I'm not up on the latest, but was this with the new Connect version?
Comment 5 written by Raymond Camden on 13 May 2008, at 9:42 PM

@barry.b: Yes. The 'crashes' only began with Leopard. Those were ok. I could get back in within 60 seconds. What happened today though was much worse.

@ron - I'm definitely up to try again, as for in person, if you can arrange to get me up there, I'll do it. :)

@justin - I couldn't do anything as a presenter - screen share or audio. And most of my presos are heavy code, little slide.
Comment 6 written by Sean Corfield on 13 May 2008, at 11:18 PM

Adobe recently updated the Connect Add-In for Leopard support. Occasionally I've seen situations where you have old, conflicting or corrupted add-ins (if you get a bad network glitch while installing an updated add-in).

Go to:

~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/www.macromedia.com/bin/

and remove any connect or breeze addin folders.

Next time you use Connect, you'll get to reinstall the new add-in.

Hope that helps.
Comment 7 written by Sean Corfield on 13 May 2008, at 11:18 PM

And the Connect admin login URL is...

http://admin.acrobat.com/
Comment 8 written by Eric Hoffman on 13 May 2008, at 11:41 PM

I just did that tonight for a troubleshooting session...and after the install, it seems to be stable at this point. I will test a full presentation with Canada tomorrow.
Comment 9 written by Jeff on 14 May 2008, at 8:10 AM

Not to start a flame war here, but I really don't care for the Connect/Breeze product. I understand the need for it for giving live presentations, but for recorded presentations, I would rather not have to sit through a poll and watch people post messages. Isn't there a way to just show the video for recorded presentations? At least then, it won't resize my Firefox window.

There are too many CF/Flex presentations on the web that are in this format. Why? How come I can watch screencasts recorded by individuals with nothing more than software like SnapzPro or iShowU that are of higher quality with better audio and video? Is it Flash itself? Does Adobe prevent presentations in other formats? Does Breeze/Connect support h.264? Do I have the capability to download a flash video and watch it offline?

It gets very annoying when I try to watch an Adobe sponsored presentation for some ColdFusion or Flex topic and I can barely watch it because of the choppy audio or video from Connect. Please Adobe, after the presentation is over, go back and make a real screencast in a high quality format.

By the way Ray, you could use iChat for presentations. Not sure of the limit, but I think you can connect up to 3 people at a time. And you can record your presentation. It will ask the other people in iChat for their permission. When the presentation is over, it saves your audio chats as AAC files and video chats in mpeg-4 files.

Ok, I'm done. :-)
Comment 10 written by justin on 14 May 2008, at 8:13 AM

Lack of post-production editing is a real bummer. Fortunately that has been corrected in the new version.
Comment 11 written by barry.b on 14 May 2008, at 8:26 AM

@Jeff

Connect is first and formost a collaboration tool. that means that the live effect is much more important than recordings. If you want a recording, try captivate. Andrew Muller (ACUGA user group manager) uses Captivate within Connect to good effect: http://breeze.webqem.com/p43878073/

also...
are you sure iChat would work just as well?
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=20808...
Connect has very little problem punching through corporate firewalls as well as being cross-platform.

@Ray

this was suggested over the Flexaussie list. it might help for next time
http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/common/help/en/support...
Comment 12 written by Eric Hoffman on 14 May 2008, at 8:52 AM

@ Jeff

Get a faster connection. jk :)

Our clients find the polish and reliability of Connect to be compelling, vs random limited products that can't reach the full spectrum of its capabilities. No muss, no fuss, no worries about firewalls or plugins.

I fully expect 7 to be even better!
Comment 13 written by Raymond Camden on 14 May 2008, at 9:28 AM

Killing the plugin helped. Thanks Sean. Someone had recommended that at the meeting, but I couldn't find where it was installed, and the Search @ Adobe was useless.

Oddly - it took a REALLY long time to get back into the meeting. Like 5 minutes total I think. I remember the process being much quicker in the past.
Comment 14 written by David O Malley on 14 May 2008, at 10:32 AM

Ray - no need to apologize, these things happen! Thanks for giving it a good college try, and hopefully we'll get you back again in the near future. Couldn't help ribbing you, tho ;-)

Cheers,

David
Comment 15 written by aadams on 14 May 2008, at 11:49 AM

Just an OT observation. When m$ windows flakes out people love to point out how crappy it is (myself included), but when a mac is the culprit there seems to be no fault. Is it that mac users just expect things not to work all the time? Like your comment Ray: "but mainly just random crashes 2-3 times an hour" - you say that like that's ok.

I've seen a few of these presentations go south when the presenter was on a mac. Maybe you guys could sell your mac toys and buy a big-boy computer? :)

For the record, vista sucks just as bad as any mac OS.
Comment 16 written by Raymond Camden on 14 May 2008, at 11:54 AM

Oh - I know my Mac isn't perfect. ;) But it is a heck of a lot easier/better for me than Windows ever was.
Comment 17 written by Richard A. Bennion on 15 May 2008, at 12:56 AM

I have also noticed that Connect quits on me about once every 20 minutes. I am running Leopard as well. Never ran it on Tiger so I would not know what the difference was.

Ray, let me know if you resolve the issue.
Comment 18 written by Raymond Camden on 15 May 2008, at 5:42 AM

Killing the plugin did fix things Richard - but I don't know if it fixed the 'crash every 20 mins or so bug'. I'll have to wait till next time I present. I _thought_ that bug was already fixed - I know an Adobe person told me that about 2 months ago. I'll have to see next time I give a long presentation.
Comment 19 written by El Guillermo on 19 May 2008, at 7:24 PM

Suggested Solution :
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?ext...
Comment 20 written by Heidi Costa on 21 May 2008, at 8:38 AM

Found this in the release notes of Connect Pro 7:
On Macintosh, the Meeting Add?in will fail to launch a meeting if either the width or the
height of the screen resolution is set to 2000 pixels or greater. The window appears but is blank (white).

Workaround: lower the screen resolution, or launch the meeting in the browser (append
"?launcher=false" to the url)
Comment 21 written by Raymond Camden on 21 May 2008, at 8:45 PM

That sounds like me. I've got a 30 inch monitor so my resolution is quite high.
Comment 22 written by kamil Walas on 2 February 2009, at 10:52 AM

I know this is an older post...but there were some issues with 30inch displays and Adobe Connect. I think this has been resolved now.
Comment 23 written by Raymond Camden on 2 February 2009, at 10:54 AM

I still see this failing for me Kamil. Some Connect sessions work, some don't. I end up doing the ?launcher=false trick to keep the meeting in the browser window.