Raymond Camden's Blog Rss

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

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Posted in | Posted on 05-13-2008 | 6,571 views

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.

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barry.b said on 05-13-2008 at 6:49 PM #
Ray, I take it you're using Leopard and when using the Tiger OS you never had a hassle?
ron hiner said on 05-13-2008 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
Eric Hoffman said on 05-13-2008 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.
justin said on 05-13-2008 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?
Raymond Camden said on 05-13-2008 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.
Sean Corfield said on 05-13-2008 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.
Sean Corfield said on 05-13-2008 at 11:18 PM #
And the Connect admin login URL is...

http://admin.acrobat.com/
Eric Hoffman said on 05-13-2008 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.
Jeff said on 05-14-2008 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. :-)
justin said on 05-14-2008 at 8:13 AM #
Lack of post-production editing is a real bummer. Fortunately that has been corrected in the new version.
barry.b said on 05-14-2008 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...
Eric Hoffman said on 05-14-2008 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!
Raymond Camden said on 05-14-2008 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.
David O Malley said on 05-14-2008 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
aadams said on 05-14-2008 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.
Raymond Camden said on 05-14-2008 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.
Richard A. Bennion said on 05-15-2008 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.
Raymond Camden said on 05-15-2008 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.
El Guillermo said on 05-19-2008 at 7:24 PM #
Suggested Solution :
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?ext...
Heidi Costa said on 05-21-2008 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)
Raymond Camden said on 05-21-2008 at 8:45 PM #
That sounds like me. I've got a 30 inch monitor so my resolution is quite high.
kamil Walas said on 02-02-2009 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.
Raymond Camden said on 02-02-2009 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.

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