Slashdot Mirror

Open soure flash development: (I havn't tried, it but a quick googled turned this up)

http://www.actionscript.com/index.php/fw/1/towards -open-source-flash-development/

There's also Laszlo, which generates Flash documents. Oh yea. That's open source and runs on J2EE servers.

I almost forgot, IBM made an eclipse plugin for laszlo too! http://alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/ide4laszlo

Now, you truly can make flash content on you Ubuntu Hoary box.

Adobe vs. Microsoft.

AFAIK Microsoft is getting their PDF and Flash replacements ready as we speak.

http://www.actionscript.com/archives/00000587.html
http://www.pdfzone.com/category2/0,1874,1836049,00 .asp

the point is that its a lot more work to do in Flash some things you get for free in the browser

And vice-versa as rndmcnlly commented in his post. It sounds like you're familiar with Flash, and know that there are different ways to scale the elements, and to me that's an asset. (If you need to do something like you talked about it looks like there's some example code in the comments of the third full browser Flash article.)

I would pose to you, though, that for creating simple web applications you might want to use Flash's old default scaling behavior instead - which is to scale every element proportionally. After all, what application besides a document reader do you scroll? If Apple was right that bad usability arises when we hide elements in a right-click menu, what happens when you hide elements below the fold?

I used Flash's proportional scaling for one of the in-house applications I built and it worked great. The limited screen space made us carefully consider the design, and the users thought it worked well. I had one manager who was always having a hard time reading image-based websites because she had her resolution set very low, but when she brought up my proportionally scaling web application she had no problems at all. Things didn't look as pretty and smooth at low-res, but everything was in its palce, and everything worked.

That, btw, is what I consider Flash's ultimate future-proofing. If you use all vector assets in a proportiaonlly scaling Flash app, your application will work 30 years from now when we have 300dpi displays. There are a number of old content sites that I've noticed super-sizeing their content, because of how screen resolutions have changed over the past 5 years.

Also, there is a trick for using a browser's scroll bar with scaling Flash if you have one dimension fixed and the other one is scaled, but it's a little bit of a hack, and I'm not sure anyone's interested.

Flash movies must always run at a fixed size.

That's not accurate, Flash movies can run at a percentage size. In fact, Actionscript.com just recently put out a series of articles about full browser flash, though it's a capability that Flash has had for as long as I can remember.

Some folks might be interested to learn of the open-source Flash development trend that is slowly growing. People are starting to use open tools such as Eclipse, Flashout and MTASC to program and compile Flash applications.

at this point there is the open source mtasc copiler, which not only is free, but is much faster and can be customizes the macromedia's.

personally, I use another open source editor called sepy which rocks!

now there are quite a few alternatives to authoring flash content away from macromedia.
no need to create a conspiracy where there is none.
and yes, svg cannot do many things the flash player can, go check it.

Dreamweaver
Works under crossover office. Also see NVU, Bluefish, and Quanta for great native GUI HTML composers that run natively.

Warcraft
Frecraft or under TransGaming.

Neverwinter
Runs natively

EQ
Runs under Trans Gaming

Ya know I saw a Leapster at a local big box store. It can do color and decent sound via Flash 5 and uses normal batteries. Plus the Leapster costs less then half of the price of the Simputer.

When the Simputer was first announced it was a great idea, cheap portable computing. Now I can get alomst the same thing as a toy.

And just today, Macromedia announced the Flash Player 6 for Microsoft Pocket PCs, including support for streaming video.

Flash Player 6 For Pocket PC Now Available!

The Jakob Neilsen story was on ActionScript.com (a Flash news blog) yesterday. Here is a list of the HORRIBLE USABILITY BUGS on the Nielsen Norman Group's own web site. Fortunately (unfortunately for my karma? ;-) these problems were fixed last night.

1) broken graphic at bottom of page
2) click on People, you go to Services
3) click on Services, you go to Publications
4) click on Publications, you go to Events
5) click on Events, you go to About
6) click on Jakob Nielsen, you go to Don Norman's web site
7) click on Donald A. Norman, you go to Ask Tog
8) click on Nielsen Norman Group Members, you go to Events
9) click on User Experience 2001/2002, you go to Services
10) click on Usability Testing and Reviews, you go to Process and Strategy
11) click on Process and Strategy, you go to Seminars
12) click on Contacting, you go to the MM/JN press release on Yahoo