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They actually announced they're using WebKit for Apollo.

I'm a huge fan of SVG. Not because it's a replacement for Flash, but because it's just XML, which means you can create data-based SVG images "out of thin air" with PHP or the scripting language of your choice. But now that Adobe has bought Macromedia (and with it, Flash) it looks like they're going to give up on SVG. I'm sure their apps will let you save as SVG, but they're going to quit supporting the viewer on 1/1/2008. And theirs was the dominant viewer. Mozilla has native support, and Safari is getting it, but that's nowhere near the adoption rate of MSIE or Flash.*

I was really hoping that they'd go the other way--that with the purchase of Macromedia, they'd roll SVG support into the hugely popular Flash plug-in. I wish I were wrong, but my guess is that Adobe, just like MS or anyone else, would rather back a proprietary solution (that they own) than an open one.

* and, the funny thing is, the MSIE/Adobe combination--on Mac and Windows--was the best. You could print a page with lots of embedded SVG images, and it worked! Safari with Adobe's plugin, or Mozilla with the plugin or natively, would print each image on a separate page, if at all. (Though I haven't tested FF 2.0 yet.) But MSIE/Adobe printed just as you saw on screen.

"Why is FF 2.0 so unstable on my Intel iMac?"

"Why is FF 2.0 so unstable on my Intel iMac?"

"Why is FF 2.0 so unstable on my Intel iMac?"

In >20 years how many times has Dvorak actually been right?

Also, last I checked, there is already proprietary software for Linux already and GPL hasn't stopped them due to any viral "tainting."

(Yeah I know one of those is going GPL soon but isn't yet)

Then there are those which skirt the GPL and where the legality is questionable, such as NVidia's and ATI's video drivers.

In >20 years how many times has Dvorak actually been right?

Also, last I checked, there is already proprietary software for Linux already and GPL hasn't stopped them due to any viral "tainting."

(Yeah I know one of those is going GPL soon but isn't yet)

Then there are those which skirt the GPL and where the legality is questionable, such as NVidia's and ATI's video drivers.

In my personal tests, Actionscript is over 100 times slower than Quickbasic. Why the hell is that the case? Both are interpreted languages. Actionscript even compiles to bytecode before it's executed, and I think Quickbasic does something similar as well. Does static typing alone really cause a language to run faster? Or is it just what happens when you design interpreters for high vs. low-specification processors?

With which version of the FlashPlayer did you do that test?
Tamarin is the VM introduced for FlashPlayer 9, aka. AVM2. The above sounds like you tested on AVM1, which is included in FP9 for backwards compatibility. AVM2/Tamarin is JIT compiled, and significantly faster than AVM1. If you want to test, you will need to specifically compile for it, either by using Adobe's free as in beer Flex SDK if you like to use ActionScript 3, or haXe for an open source alternative that has some aditional features.

What are Mozilla's intentions now with respect to SVG? One can not ignore that the specification of SVG with respect to Adobe's Flash product. To my thinking, SVG, or its spawn, is the direction of future web developement.

Today, Adobe released the source for its ActionScript Virtual Machine to the Mozilla Foundation.

That's what Adobe did. Since this blog is a common stop for open source-minded folk, I thought it might be pertinent to use this space to discuss what Adobe didn't do:

        * Adobe did not open source the Flash Player.
        * Adobe did not incorporate the Flash Player into Mozilla.
        * Adobe did not license Mozilla's HTML rendering engine.
        * Adobe did not purchase Mozilla, or vice versa.

The project is specified by the name Tamarin, as in the monkey, in keeping with Mozilla's primate-naming conventions. Fun fact: Adobe is contributing around 135 KLOC (thousands of lines of code) of source code to the Tamarin project. So, in the grand tradition of open source collaboration, I invite you to jump right in.

Here is the official Adobe Announcement:
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressrel eases/200611/110706Mozilla.html

And here is a great blog post from Tinic, one of the Flash Player engineers:
http://www.kaourantin.net/2006/11/spidermonkeys-re lative-tamarin-joins.html

And the Tamarin FAQ:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/faq.html

Please read these before you post FUD. Oh wait... This is /. FUD away. ;)

I'm not a huge fan of Flash in general. It is too much like FrontPage... A thousand script kiddies to every 1 intelligent user. However, I believe a closer interaction and level of support for scripting languages that are shared between standard HTML pages and embedded objects will simplify (and hopefully speed up) development. ECMA Script is a very powerful tool in the right hands and Flash has some very interesting capabilities when paired with the Flash Media Server or Red5 (OSS) My 7 cents.

The general populace cannot properly build a PC. I have experienced firsthand the results of someone trying to build their own PC, time and time again. There are just too many things that can go wrong. But they should not have to settle for Dell if they do not want. That makes it my job to select quality brand name parts and assemble a quality PC, and if a person wants a $300 PC, then that's what I will build for them. If they want a $600 PC, ok. The more you pay, the more power.

Of course, the other great choice to be offered is Linux, or Windows, or both? Dual boot, VMWare Player, or both? I have now 250 customers, many local, a few not, who enjoy their linux PC and receive tech support and software updates from me, free for the first year, or longer if they wish (for extra $$).

Right now many of my customers are enjoying their new 3D accelerated desktops (video!), and hopefully everyone will have this by christmas. Flash player 9 is also going on select customer desktops, those who are comfortable trying out new software which is not official. All of my customers recieve emails describing services from rhapsody.com, emusic.com, abc.com, new features from KDE and related software (amarok!), and other news of interest.

The main theme here is support. It should not be as difficult as it is with Dell. I think it should be more personal, and that is what i hope to offer. That and, of course, a better quality PC than can be found elsewhere. That, above all, is why I entered this business.. working on Dell, Gateway and Compaq etc PCs for years left me wanting something more for my customers, like quality name brand parts, painless and inexpensive hardware and software updates, and of course, personalized tech support.

With a quoted phrase '"u tube"', you are correct. With the much more likely unquoted two-word search phrase 'u tube', Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation's utube.com is the second result, behind youtube.com.

Yes, you are right. I'm just too used to searching with quotes, I guess, that I dind't think about not doing it. That doesn't change the fact that their markup is horrendous, though my original point about that being the reason for their absence from Google's index is now proven to be partly incorrect. My research could have been better, I admit.

Didn't suggest that it was. Only that your statement that "Non-semantic code is basically just jibberish for search engines" is about an order of magnitude too strong.

Well, it doesn't make any more sense to a search engine than a PDF document or Flash file without any accessibility voodoo applied to it. It's basically just a huge blob of text, where no parts of the text are weighed or indexed any differently than the other. And that's not very search engine — nor user — friendly.

What is the future for XUL? Are there plans to allow XUL to perform over remote HTTP, fixing the current security problems?

It seems to me that a lot of work has already gone into XUL and so much was achieved in this area, yet few advancements have been made over the last few years. Many believe that there is a true opportunity here to provide a platform for networked application delivery, but will XUL be a true competitor to Flex and/or XAML?

/dave

The flash 9 beta works for me.

Adobe created a program that would allow users to create a 3D website. It was a great concept, but it did run very clunky like, but I think if they revived it it might work. I downloaded a copy a long time ago and messed around with it. It was pretty basic but I guess they got no support for it cause now its dead.

Why am I modded "Interesting"? This was supposed to be funny! CSS and transparency, are far from fully implemented!

Nonetheless, the SVG bit is important. Allow me to restate the question in a less sarcastic/funny way:

I am currently one of the developers on an existing online application that uses a combination of SVG and javascript for an important piece of functionality. Currently, our users using Internet Explorer can use this functionality thanks to the Adobe SVG plugin for IE that comes bundled with Acrobat Reader. However, Adobe has recently announced the end of life of this product and has also announced that not all of its features will work on Vista. Will Microsoft take steps to ensure that SVG remain usable for users of IE? If so, can you provide us with concrete data on what these steps will be?

"It is BECAUSE it cannot guarantee swapping by the OS, so as a hack, you allocate far less memory than is physically available in the hopes that Windows will not swap."

Umm, nope. You can lock pages into memory using Win32 -- if you're using AWE to allocate memory it is never swapped out. http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/lib rary/00284c8d-7a42-40f2-8a01-8de61dccd8c91033.mspx ?mfr=true

"AWE allows an application to reserve portions of real memory that cannot be paged out to the paging file or otherwise manipulated except by the reserving application. AWE will keep this data in real memory at all times. Because the memory manager does not manage this memory, it will never be swapped out to the paging file. The application is completely responsible for handling the memory."

AWE allows allocating huge amounts of memory - in excess of the 4GB virtual address space each process has (although you can only allocate out of physical ram, it is aimed at many-gigabyte servers; it does work perfectly fine on XP.)

(Okay, DDJ asserts that AWE is the only way to lock pages into memory; nevertheless, AWE has been around since Windows 2000.)

Also, stop and think about MacOS 9 memory managment. An obivous reason why that feature was not included in MacOS 9 versions of photoshop is because the MacOS 9 allocated memory to the program at start up - remember, you change the amount of RAM allocated by using Get Info in the finder? Adobe didn't need to implement this "hack" BECAUSE IT WAS PART OF THE OPERATING SYSTEM.

The real reason why Photoshop uses its own scratch disks instead of Windows or MacOS (or MacOS X) VMM is simple. The scratch disk system supports multiple exabytes of space - you require a 64 bit operating system and a 64 bit native version of photoshop to handle that amount of space using the OS's VMM, and 64 bit just isn't common on either Windows or Mac.

If you think about the amounts of data that photoshop could potentially work with (huge billboards, multiple layers, 16 bits per channel with several undo levels) it's not surprising that Photoshop may need to work with very large data sets.)

So, you're the one that hasn't tried the flash player 9 beta yet!?

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

Worked for me. Here ya go. It's beta, but so far I've had no problems with it. (Running Mepis 6)

You probably need the new flashplayer9 beta. I was able to watch the video fine with it in Firefox2-rc3 on Gentoo :)

Get it here.

As good as I think it is to see Linux get a native flash player it still bums me out to see that they have forgotten the BSDs again. Come one, they have players for Linux, HP-UX, Solaris and yet can't get a player compiled for FreeBSD.

Please go to Adobe Feature Request and request a native FreeBSD flash player. The community would greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

-Link

As it has been slashdot, here are direct links to the files

http://www.adobe.com/go/fp9_update_b1_installer_li nuxplugin

http://www.adobe.com/go/fp9_update_b1_standalone_l inux

As it has been slashdot, here are direct links to the files

http://www.adobe.com/go/fp9_update_b1_installer_li nuxplugin

http://www.adobe.com/go/fp9_update_b1_standalone_l inux

Still no PPC version? Lame.

Submit a feature request here: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name =wishform and tell them to release a PPC build

Is there any news if it supports AMD 64 architecture?
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/re leasenotes.html doesn't reveal anything. Please support 64 bit installations too :/

Just as well that Adobe have released a beta of Flash 9 for Linux today then.

How come this is on Slashdot before news about Flash Player 9 for Linux?

Go ahead and mod me down for Flamebait, but honestly - the very few people here that care about IE7 had it during beta, so this isn't huge news.

Are you sure? There are a number of technologies available for Linux & Mac which could easily be (and in many cases have been) attack vectors of the "download and run arbitrary code" type.

Really? You have a strange definition of "proprietary". The specs are available here and have been since PDF was first introduced.

Its closed source

I would like to point out that Adobe didnot actually say anything to M$ at all about PDF in office. (M$ already has plenty of PDF support in the Mac version and why would Adobe have a problem with promotion of its own format?) but rather M$ just came up with a convenient excuse to trash PDF and claimed the possibility of a lawsuit as the reason for pulling PDF off.

This CNet article indicates otherwise:

Adobe wants the software giant to remove the PDF "save as" feature from its beta version of Office 2007 or to charge a fee for it, whereas Microsoft wants to offer that feature for free, said Dave Heiner, the deputy general counsel who oversees Microsoft's antitrust cases.

Adobe's response mentions fears of Microsoft "embracing and extending" PDF:

Microsoft has demonstrated a practice of using its monopoly power to undermine cross platform technologies and constrain innovation that threatens its monopolies. Microsoft's approach has been to "embrace and extend" standards that do not come from Microsoft. Adobe's concern is that Microsoft will fragment and possibly degrade existing and established standards, including PDF, while using its monopoly power to introduce Microsoft-controlled alternatives - such as XPS. The long-term impact of this kind of behavior is that consumers are ultimately left with fewer choices.

Microsoft employee Brian Jones has a blog response which claims that Microsoft works to honor PDF standards, including supporting ISO 19005-1 compliant PDF/A:

Remember we are only a producer of this stuff (not a consumer), and doing anything non-compliant would just mean that our output would be flawed and not look right. That would of course undermine all the work we've done to build this support in the first place... we want people to use it.

What's the truth behind it all? I personally agree with Brian Jones. Writing a half-baked implementation of PDF wouldn't do Microsoft any good; they'd get tons of negative publicity and no one would ever use the feature, even if it improved in the future.

Please, in the future, before posting an explanation kindly know what in the hell you're babbling on about.

PostScript and PCL are most certainly used for nearly the same purposes: A Page Description Language, aka PDL. Indeed PCL was explicitly created by HP as a simpler, faster and unlicensed alternative to PostScript.

Postscript & PDF are related in that PDF is based on Postscript (a well written brief history of PDF). PDF simply builds upon PS to include meta information, JavaScript, hyperlinking (internally & externally), forms & tag structures, extended colorspaces, etc. And yes, many Postscript level 3 printers can directly print PDF. (That you're unfamiliar with this feature is likely due to your apparent near complete ignorance of high end or prepress printing.)

Oh, and most self-respecting printers don't support PCL, just those from HP or licensing PCL or it's clones (yes, the PostScript workalike has its own clone market!) Further confusing things HP now uses a PostScript clone called Phoenix in their laser printers so they can offer ps support without paying Adobe licensing fees.

Of course, PostScript & PDF are now publicly documented and it is possible to recreate them, with Ghostscript being the best known example (Phoenix is probably the most widely distributed)

Lastly, XPS is just a document format as is ODF, PDF,, NO. Nothing about that is right, indeed it pretty much completes every statement in your posting being flat out wrong or wildly inaccurate.

Go away and don't post again until you have something at least marginally correct or interesting to "News for Nerds". You're drooling in public and it is ugly, annoying, and counter-productive.

Please, in the future, before posting an explanation kindly know what in the hell you're babbling on about.

PostScript and PCL are most certainly used for nearly the same purposes: A Page Description Language, aka PDL. Indeed PCL was explicitly created by HP as a simpler, faster and unlicensed alternative to PostScript.

Postscript & PDF are related in that PDF is based on Postscript (a well written brief history of PDF). PDF simply builds upon PS to include meta information, JavaScript, hyperlinking (internally & externally), forms & tag structures, extended colorspaces, etc. And yes, many Postscript level 3 printers can directly print PDF. (That you're unfamiliar with this feature is likely due to your apparent near complete ignorance of high end or prepress printing.)

Oh, and most self-respecting printers don't support PCL, just those from HP or licensing PCL or it's clones (yes, the PostScript workalike has its own clone market!) Further confusing things HP now uses a PostScript clone called Phoenix in their laser printers so they can offer ps support without paying Adobe licensing fees.

Of course, PostScript & PDF are now publicly documented and it is possible to recreate them, with Ghostscript being the best known example (Phoenix is probably the most widely distributed)

Lastly, XPS is just a document format as is ODF, PDF,, NO. Nothing about that is right, indeed it pretty much completes every statement in your posting being flat out wrong or wildly inaccurate.

Go away and don't post again until you have something at least marginally correct or interesting to "News for Nerds". You're drooling in public and it is ugly, annoying, and counter-productive.

Please, in the future, before posting an explanation kindly know what in the hell you're babbling on about.

PostScript and PCL are most certainly used for nearly the same purposes: A Page Description Language, aka PDL. Indeed PCL was explicitly created by HP as a simpler, faster and unlicensed alternative to PostScript.

Postscript & PDF are related in that PDF is based on Postscript (a well written brief history of PDF). PDF simply builds upon PS to include meta information, JavaScript, hyperlinking (internally & externally), forms & tag structures, extended colorspaces, etc. And yes, many Postscript level 3 printers can directly print PDF. (That you're unfamiliar with this feature is likely due to your apparent near complete ignorance of high end or prepress printing.)

Oh, and most self-respecting printers don't support PCL, just those from HP or licensing PCL or it's clones (yes, the PostScript workalike has its own clone market!) Further confusing things HP now uses a PostScript clone called Phoenix in their laser printers so they can offer ps support without paying Adobe licensing fees.

Of course, PostScript & PDF are now publicly documented and it is possible to recreate them, with Ghostscript being the best known example (Phoenix is probably the most widely distributed)

Lastly, XPS is just a document format as is ODF, PDF,, NO. Nothing about that is right, indeed it pretty much completes every statement in your posting being flat out wrong or wildly inaccurate.

Go away and don't post again until you have something at least marginally correct or interesting to "News for Nerds". You're drooling in public and it is ugly, annoying, and counter-productive.

Or Sun could just use virtual conferencing software like Breeze that's written explicitly for that purpose in the first place and runs on Flash which is somewhat more widely distributed than the "get a" Life client.

Then again, maybe in Second Life Sun's a successful company.

The opening of Adobe's own site discussing the PDF reference makes it clear that it is intended for individual's looking to develop applications that create as well as modify PDF documents.

"The PDF Reference provides a description of the Portable Document Format and is intended for application developers wishing to develop applications that create PDF files directly, as well as read or modify PDF document content."

a file format proprietary to Adobe Systems for representing two-dimensional documents in a device independent and resolution independent fixed-layout document format.

There are people that create software, beta test software, classify images, submit bug reports and do a whole host of things that benefit companies. They do it for a wide variety of reasons. One of the best reasons is because often when we help, we are making the world we live in a better place to live and we are helping ourselves.

We've got Cold Fusion now.

photoshop's got scripting: javascript, applescript, visual basic.
not too intuitive, poorly documented, but scripting nonetheless.

Many vendors and frameworks have been trying for years to lead the UI movement.
But neither win32, mfc, qt, gtk, kde, wxWindows can find the promise of separate the OS rigidity from the UI

Just Squeak give us more freedom, but from a business perspective Adobe is playing a very strong card with Flex
Imagine a creative designer with all the freedom to create the best UI without more limitations!
We can see some real examples of Windows interfaces in flash like ScreenTime

Many vendors and frameworks have been trying for years to lead the UI movement.
But neither win32, mfc, qt, gtk, kde, wxWindows can find the promise of separate the OS rigidity from the UI

Just Squeak give us more freedom, but from a business perspective Adobe is playing a very strong card with Flex
Imagine a creative designer with all the freedom to create the best UI without more limitations!
We can see some real examples of Windows interfaces in flash like ScreenTime

Umm.. PDF is a free format AFAIK:
http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/pdf/ind ex_reference.html

There are plenty of apps (other than Adobe's) that can read and create pdf files.

Break what law? PDF is an open format. LOL!!! Edumacate urself!!! http://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/2005/12/acrobat_and _pdf.html

Basically, the PDF standard allows for a lot of ways to access data on your local machine, in databases, and through your web browser. It also has mechanisms for running JavaScript, and even executing arbitrary local programs. Some of these things require a user to click on a link in a PDF, and some require just openning the PDF or visiting a specific page in the PDF.

Many of these features are quite helpful for corporate clients, but maybe shouldn't be allowed by default.

In retrospect, some of the other free 3rd part PDF viewers, that don't support those fancy features, might be better for people to use:

http://www.icesoft.com/products/icepdf.html

I don't know if there's a real programming language behind it

Flash 9 is coded using ActionScript 3, which is tracking the still-in-progress ECMAScript 4 standard.

I think people generally want a fully integrated, front to backend solution for developing these Rich applications

Just like ColdFusion, Flex & Flash?

CF's a very RAD language, for the most part it is OO, has native access to Java (ie, you can write java code in ColdFusion). Can call COM & Corba objects, etc ,etc. It fully supports Flash remoting.

I'm working on a very large ColdFusion project at the moment, and whilst the language makes me want to throw my computer out the window at times, on the whole, it's a great platfor.

They're working on it. http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/