Looks like I might have to upgrade to Flash MX finally and soon get back up to speed with the new Flash version of cookies called Local Shared Objects. It’s doubtful I’d ever need to use them but I like to keep up to speed on things like this just in case.

Macromedia has a smaill primer here. There is a Local Shared Objects Tutorial here:

Flash MX Shared objects are a new feature that allow you to store information on the clients machine the same way as cookies would and retrieve it at a later time … Shared objects are stored in .sol files located in the Flash player directory of the user’s profile, example: “C:/Documents and
Settings/ Administrator / ApplicationData/ Macromedia/Flash Player”, and have their own format.

I wonder how good the encryption is in these .sol files and/or optional supported encryption types. Blowfish? Triple DES? Hope it’s not only plain text or that’s a bust.

There are definitely some size restrictions:

By default, Macromedia Flash MXcan save locally persistent remote shared objects up to 100 K in size.

I’m not sure I like how it alerts the user to save sizes. They use the word “larger objects” but I see the slider goes down to 1k (and if you keep reading, the user can completely disable local saves of any size). That’s a piddily amount of information (1024 bytes) before alerting the user with a dialog box. The user can adjust the slider all the way up to 100k, but if the user has it set to the minimum than the end user experience will be interupted. It should be seamless up to say at least 10k and then prompt over that. Heck, just surfing one average webpage will add more to the user’s browser cache than 10k. Nobody really worries about 10k files any more with hard drives coming with a minimum of 20-40 GB these days.

Greg Yardley offers his opinion on LSO’s and links to how to shut them down altogether:

To anyone considering using LSOs, I recommend not bothering. It’ll be a waste of time; while these new Flash cookies aren’t as easily eraseable as the ordinary variety yet, I’m sure someone will get right on it. To see (and erase) your Local Shared Objects, click here for Macromedia’s Flash Player Settings Manager. Set the ‘global storage settings’ to ‘none’ to keep LSOs off your computer permanently

Maybe Greg’s right and this is not worth the bother. Hmm.

tags: local+shared+objects

Did this post make you go hmm?

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