Wow, finally this juicy nugget in the release notes for Flash player 10…
Up until now, it has not been possible to have keyboard controls when running Flash in full screen mode (the mode where a video or game fills your whole screen). This means we’ve not been able to have keyboard control on WorldTV for such things as play/stop, forward, rewind on video controls, or for keyboard control of games like Free Tetris running full-screen.
Adobe has held off on this for a long time because they were worried hackers would start using Flash to imitate your computer’s desktop in Flash, and get you to enter passwords or other sensitive data. It was a valid concern, and they’ve addressed it by only allowing keyboard access to certain ‘non-printing’ characters like the arrow keys, space bar, tab etc, starting with Flash 10. This is an excellent compromise… and welcomed!
Now we can see some super cool applications where Flash can take over your whole screen and allow keyboard control of the application, effectively bypass the OS, something I first dreamed about 10 years ago…
Here’s the relevant text from Adobe…
“Limited Fullscreen Keyboard Access — In Flash Player 10, key events are supported for non-printing keys such as arrows, shift, enter, tab, space, etc. Limited access to the keyboard will allow fullScreen games and video controls with keyboard access in a secure way.”