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It's somewhere between 96% and 98%. Persons who don't know enough to install plugins most likely bought a PC with said plugins pre-installed. Pretty much the only persons who don't have Flash installed are the neo-Luddites who hang out here.

I don't know what you're smoking - most of what you said is completely untrue today. You can connect to anything that an AJAX app can, and then some. There is E4X support for drilling down into SOAP responses, etc. And you store your source code in a package tree just like Java - no binaries needed.

For anyone who has doubts, take a look at Flex. It is a mature, free, flexible platform for developing RIAs on Flash.

Just to sprinkle some numbers into the discussion...

http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashp layer/version_penetration.html

• The Flash Player 9 Features page states "Experience up to ten times faster ActionScript 3.0 execution with the new virtual machine and optimized compiler." That should speed up the client side code considerably.
• Using the ExternalInterface library you can make calls from Flash directly into Javascript and vice versa. Use whatever communication gateway you want (ASP, CF, XMLHTTP, etc). This has been around since atleast Flash Player 8. Using a less elegant method (fscommand and flashvars) you could have done the same thing back in version 5.
• You absolutely can seperate out Actionscript into seperate files. Google for "Actionscript #import" to see plenty of examples

What they failed to tell you, was that flash version 723 is being released for windows next week.

But currently...

The table below contains the latest Flash Player version information.
Windows ... 9,0,28,0
Macintosh - OS X ... 9,0,28,0
Linux ... 9,0,31,0

... we can just enjoy our status as the most up to date Flash Player platform. =)

Rejoice, there is a restrictive EULA attached to the flash player! You can find it here: http://www.adobe.com/products/eulas/players/flash/ .

Among other nice things, you will find a whole section about "Restrictions.", including this:

3.1 Web Player Prohibited Devices. You may not Use any Web Player on any non-PC device or with any embedded or device version of any operating system. For the avoidance of doubt, and by example only, you may not use a Web Player on any (a) mobile devices, set top boxes (STB), handhelds, phones, web pads, tablets and Tablet PCs that are not running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, game consoles, TVs, DVD players, media centers (excluding Windows XP Media Center Edition and its successors), electronic billboards or other digital signage, internet appliances or other internet-connected devices, PDAs, medical devices, ATMs, telematic devices, gaming machines, home automation systems, kiosks, remote control devices, or any other consumer electronics device, (b) operator-based mobile, cable, satellite, or television systems or (c) other closed system devices.

• You are using Linux in your media center and thinking about using Flash? Nope, this is forbidden!
• You are using Linux in your tablet PC or web pad (e.g., Nokia N770 or N800) and thinking about using Flash? Nope, this is forbidden!
• You are using Linux in your PDA? Again, no!
• ...

Go on, complain! Oh, and just in case you have any doubt about what is the "Web Player", this is explained in the first paragraph of the EULA: "(collectively, the Flash, Shockwave and Authorware players, are the "Web Players")"

Sorry, but as far as I know, flash specification is open

3)a. You may not use the Specification in any way to create or develop a runtime, client, player, executable or other program that reads or renders .swf files.

Here's the EULA, and here's where it's linked from. Complain away! :)

Here's the EULA, and here's where it's linked from. Complain away! :)

Visit the download page from a Linux browser and you can download Flash 9 for Linux now. And P.S. the beta was out for months before this was...

Flash 9 was released for linux today. Enjoy :)

> support web services as MIME type handlers

Can Adobe provide a /dev/null web service for application/x-shockwave-flash? Actually I'm not sure about that as it would have the unfortunate side effect of removing the top yellow bar informing users that they don't have flash. Since the developer (Doron?) deemed this so important that it can't be disabled then web MIME handlers might detract from this particular user experience. I especially like the way this bar is animated in 2.0+, if only it took up a little more screen space - you just can't have enough yellow bars telling users things they are aware of. Fortunate that they added yellow bar support to the image blocking feature in 2.x. In 3.x they could extend this to every element, dismissing the yellow bar would then require numerous clicks which would be a great usability enhancement in line with other recent decisions.

> save web pages as PDF documents

That rocks, an extension would be too complex for such a crucial function and print to file and ps2pdf is much too difficult.

> Handling of back/forward with POST

At last. Glad to see the firefox devs acknowledge all end-users are experts in HTTP and understand the POST method. I think they should also work on providing consistent styling for web pages like they have for RSS and atom - we wouldn't want users getting confused; after all granny is only expert in HTTP.

I know some people are thinking that development should concentrate on SVG enhancements (SVG font), bug-fixing, modularization (XUL-Runner), integration of tamarin and x86-64 JIT. I say bah, much more important that I can print to PDF and assign the SVG MIME type to http://we-are-working-hard-to-kill-svg.adobe.com/

Kudos.

However, a lot of people don't have family or friends who are familiar or comfortable enough with Linux to be able to solve these problems

They do if they are changing to Linux. If they are "ordinary users" they'll use what they can get support for from their friends. It's not like Windows can be operated without regular maintenance by a fairly technical admin. And one reasonably savvy Linux user can support a lot of Linux users. As I said, I have a lot more time to visit when I head over to my parents house now.

But how about "niche" apps such as Photoshop

Um, Adobe specifically made sure Photoshop would run well under WINE. I'll grant Flash authoring, but most people don't need to write it (especially not the parents of most Slashdot readers), just run it, and there are current workarounds and good future prospects for that.

In short, Linux just isn't ready to seriously compete with Windows and OS-X for the common user, mostly because of lack of application support...

Well, you start out talking about greeting card programs and wrap up with Photoshop and Flash editing. I think your definition of the "common user" is a bit... odd.

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_onlin etools.html

Premier may suck, but there are motion picture companies using it > http://www.adobe.com/motion/superman_returns.html

It's five to ten years behind in terms of stability and even playback is a problem on some systems. By the way check out how this guy (After Effects production manager) ends his blog entry (on Jan 3rd)...

I can't imagine that too many people would switch to this from Final Cut Pro.

And for those wondering, this will NOT be a Universal Binary. It has been built from scratch and will only run on Intel-based Macs.

Adobe's press release.

Spare us the righeous indignation:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/

According to the discoverer, this is patched. Get version 8.0.

Macromedia published specifications for Flash starting with Flash 6 and Adobe continues to do so. The Flash 8 specification is available here. Admittedly it is only free as in beer, comes with usage restrictions and does not fully describe the main video codec (Sorenson Spark, a variation on H.263; though Flash 8 introduces a new one), but it's better than nothing.

Say WHAT?

http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/

What's so illegal about a Flash-based streaming player?

Adobe completes Macromedia acquisition

Until Adobe finally gets their Linux support done for Flash 9 (they skipped flash 8), websites should not be requiring anything later than Flash 7. That is the latest player available for Linux. Yes, they're working on it, and maybe it's even close to release, but ... horse, cart, etc. Sites should not be developing in anything later than Flash 7 until it's supported on the big three platforms.

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer9.html

While I can agree that flash-only sites are evil, you could always try the flash beta if you're desperate for the content. Works for me.

Microsoft would agree with you. That's one reason why they've adopted the "ribbons" interface for Office 2007

Now, personally, I see this as a minor evolutionary improvement on the 'tool palette' interface made popular by Adobe Systems' Photoshop and Illustrator appliations, but that's just me.

Think about those links, too. How often do you use common words in an HREF?

Flash 9.
It works the same way it works in Windows- run the installer and it installs.

...but have you looked into using Flash?

There's Red5 as an open source streaming server, as a compiler you could use the open source haXe or the free-as-in-beer Flex 2 SDK.

Since the numbers are from big box retailers only, they are pretty skewed. No online (no store.apple.com, Amazon, etc), probably not Apple's retail stores either.
  This is not true. NPD tracks a number of online retailers (including Amazon.com) as well as many smaller retailers.

Here is a report from Adobe on NPD numbers. Note: This report is about software sales, but the NPD Techworld division handles Consumer Electronics sales so the vendor list should be similar: http://www.adobe.com/macromedia/ir/macr/whitepaper s/npd_pos.pdf

The most significant issue with NPD numbers is that they do not include WalMart (NPD estimates WalMart numbers instead)

This looks really interesting: Adam and Eve
Has Anyone tried it out ?
It looks like they take the approach of using a domain specific language for building the GUI.

Simon.

I'm glad Microsoft is so innovative, because, you know, shaping a menu and toolbar differently is new, non-obvious, novel, and there is certainly no prior art containing anything similar, certainly not anything preceding it by a decade.

Given the obvious use of technology here and the subjectiveness of what may constitute a ribbon, and how broadly companies like Microsoft tend to paint their patents, I would contend that their "ribbon" is simply taking the Adobe Creative Suite's toolbar scheme that has been around for a decade and simply repainting it to fit in Microsoft Office components. Likewise, one can argue that since context-sensitive toolbars have been around for about 20 years, and buttons in those toolbars have optionally spawned menus when clicked for at least ten years, that there is NOTHING AT ALL new about a Microsoft "ribbon" aside from the artwork, which is covered by COPYRIGHT, not a patent.

I'm glad Microsoft is so innovative, because, you know, shaping a menu and toolbar differently is new, non-obvious, novel, and there is certainly no prior art containing anything similar, certainly not anything preceding it by a decade.

Given the obvious use of technology here and the subjectiveness of what may constitute a ribbon, and how broadly companies like Microsoft tend to paint their patents, I would contend that their "ribbon" is simply taking the Adobe Creative Suite's toolbar scheme that has been around for a decade and simply repainting it to fit in Microsoft Office components. Likewise, one can argue that since context-sensitive toolbars have been around for about 20 years, and buttons in those toolbars have optionally spawned menus when clicked for at least ten years, that there is NOTHING AT ALL new about a Microsoft "ribbon" aside from the artwork, which is covered by COPYRIGHT, not a patent.

Actually, Flash content can be completely 508-compliant... *if* designed properly. Keyboard Nav and ScreenReader compatibility is present; it has to be factored into your Flash design work (just as with any other development environment)

Actually, Flash content can be completely 508-compliant... *if* designed properly. Keyboard Nav and ScreenReader compatibility is present; it has to be factored into your Flash design work (just as with any other development environment)

Actually, Flash content can be completely 508-compliant... *if* designed properly. Keyboard Nav and ScreenReader compatibility is present; it has to be factored into your Flash design work (just as with any other development environment)

Actually, Flash content can be completely 508-compliant... *if* designed properly. Keyboard Nav and ScreenReader compatibility is present; it has to be factored into your Flash design work (just as with any other development environment)

Actually, Flash content can be completely 508-compliant... *if* designed properly. Keyboard Nav and ScreenReader compatibility is present; it has to be factored into your Flash design work (just as with any other development environment)

Actually, Flash content can be completely 508-compliant... *if* designed properly. Keyboard Nav and ScreenReader compatibility is present; it has to be factored into your Flash design work (just as with any other development environment)

Actually, Flash content can be completely 508-compliant... *if* designed properly. Keyboard Nav and ScreenReader compatibility is present; it has to be factored into your Flash design work (just as with any other development environment)

Actually, Flash content can be completely 508-compliant... *if* designed properly.

Keyboard Nav and ScreenReader compatibility is present; it has to be factored into your Flash design work (just as with any other development environment)

http://www.adobe.com/resources/accessibility/flash 8/faq.html

We have content creators that were thriving because of DRM-- the content creators wouldn't have put the same kind of time and effort into their creations if they couldn't be protected. And we have all that business coming to an abrupt close because of open source development.

Uh, whoa whoa whoa ... since when has "open source development" meant "making unauthorized copies"?

You can't lump together the people working on independently creating something like Inkscape with the people distributing cracked copies of Illustrator. They are two completely separate things.

The latter, conventionally called "piracy" (rightly or wrongly), is why those businesses are coming to an abrupt close, facilitated by the fact that their business models were not particularly sound in the face of that reality.

What the hell distro/version of Linux are you using?

incredibly difficulty of installing things
Oh, must not be Ubuntu.

That whole no flash 9 thing is a pain
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer9.html

the lack of any real good compatibility for windoze apps
I'm running MS Office 2003 & Photoshop 7 fine with CodeWeavers.

well, points 2 and 3 are (sometimes) easily fixed by using a newer distro. Ubuntu Edgy made some progress in wifi (i believe) and sudo is setup for the main user by default.

As for Earth From Space, check out: http://www.adobe.com/go/fp9_update_b1_installer_li nuxplugin

Just visited the site, works great for me in linux.

> now that Adobe has pulled out of SVG development

Adobe Labs still has some stake in SVG.

> its safe to say that SVG has no future outside of the tiny community of inkscape users.

All major browser manufacturers have plans for SVG at the moment, even IE has plans to eventually include SVG.

> the majority of SVG content on the web being experimental projects

Yeah, those experimental projects like Google Maps and Microsoft Live Local and Dojo...

And for those who cite that SVG is "bloated" because it's XML, maybe you haven't heard of something called "compression"...

Comments from the Adobe engineers on 64-bit player work:

http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2006/10/whats_s o_difficult_64bit_editi.html
http://www.kaourantin.net/2006/10/flash-player-9-f or-linux-beta-1.html