This came up in a discussion with my wife. My daughter recently has been blocked from http://pollypocket.everythinggirl.com/ It claims to need Flash Player 8, but as is the case with most of these detection scripts, it's probably BS. I really wish they'd just let me enter anyhow and crash my browser if I like. Anyhow there is a new player in the works now, since Adobe bought out Macromedia. I think this may just be a temporary ploy for good PR, but we'll have to see over time.

Here is the link to the blog with updates on the status of the player. Penguin.SWF.

A couple items to note are that Mike Melanson is the new engineer at Adobe who is porting the player. He is an extremely qualified person for this, having contributed quite a bit to the Linux/multimedia world. It's also interesting to note that he uses Gentoo as his development flavor of choice. Gentoo definately makes an ideal development environment. The only issue will be getting this stuff to work with Debian/RH weirdness. They'll probably just end up packaging a bunch of static libs in the end to get rpms to work.

Wendall