Slashdot Mirror

Here.

Now what would be interesting is a free Flash creator.

Kawa has been discontinued by Macromedia. Personally, I love Kawa simply because it's cheap, and easy to set up. I quickly scanned the website; it doesn't look as if Macromedia is selling old versions of the IDE.

Tek-Tools made Kawa.
They sold it to Allaire (for $9 mill!).

Macromedia bought^H^H^H merged with Alliare.

Macromedia killed off Kawa.

The tek-tools version of Kawa was quite nice, by all reports it was destroyed somewhere between Allaire + Macromedia.

Tek-Tools made Kawa.
They sold it to Allaire (for $9 mill!).

Macromedia bought^H^H^H merged with Alliare.

Macromedia killed off Kawa.

The tek-tools version of Kawa was quite nice, by all reports it was destroyed somewhere between Allaire + Macromedia.

Hope that the current version is very good, because it's a dead end.

Kawa was a nice IDE a few years ago. (But not open-source.)

I didn't track it, but it seems like it got pushed around between several companies and has finally been dumped by Macromedia. Morons.

In a sense MusicCity has just written a "browser" to contain the FastTrack "plugin". So why are they the ones that are accountable?

The essential difference between the Mozilla browser and the IE "browser" on the one hand and MusicCity's Morpheus "browser" on the other is that Mozilla and IE are primarily designed and marketed for legitimate purposes such as reading and posting to OSDN Slashdot, OSDN Freshmeat, and ex-OSDN Kuro5hin, and for viewing content with legitimate plugins such as Macromedia's SWF player, whereas MusicCity's browser cannot work with anything other than the FastTrack plugin.

I purchased Crossover several weeks ago and have been completely satisfied. Quicktime works great. Being able to watch the Fellowship of the Ring trailer on Linux is great! Shockwave works well for many sites. (In particular, Shockwave plugins for stuff like 3D has problems.) Codeweaver's tech support mailing list is great, the developers reply quickly and are very helpful.

While I would prefer that Crossover be free software, at least Codeweavers is contributing most of their improvements back to the main Wine project. Pretty much only the Crossover plugin itself is proprietary software. Buying Crossover is a great way to support the development of Wine and get Quicktime support on Linux right now.

Flash is open source, you can download a nice C++ tar file that compiles on win32 and every linux I've tried. They have downloadable native players for Windows, Macintosh,Pocket PC, OS/2, Sun Solaris,Linux x86, andSGI IRIX. at
http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/alter nates/

I must also wonder why people are down on flash? Don't confuse it with Shockwave(Macromedia's huge monster app), Flash movies are small, streaming and let you create almost anything without having all the overhead a virtual machine creates.

If you want a free way of making them check out open source JGenerator( http://www.flashgap.com/ ) which even lets you dynamically create flash on your site. Oh and JGenerator runs on almost every OS too.

The fact that you can not get the Flash plugin for Mozilla when running it on Windows 98.

Yes you can. Just go to Macromedia's site, do the "get flash" thing, and select the Windows plugin for Netscape browsers. The installer will automatically detect Mozilla and install the plugin. You may need to restart Mozilla afterward, but then you are set.

Do you really want to know who to blame for that?

Macromedia

Go to their site, can complain to them about the total lack of basic user controls for the flash player. Like: no mute, no way to fully stop animation. And the fact that they give the designer the option to remove the 'play' and 'loop' options from the right click menu. So even if those functions did fully stop the animation, the user still might not be able to stop it if the desgner thinks he's some elite asshole and knows what's best for you.

Honestly... Some of those flash adds are so fsking annoying. I actualy open a window, and re-size it to cover the offending add. I never do that to static adds.

I don't mind static adds, or even animated adds (gifs or flash) that can be stopped or only play once. But there is no excure not to provide a way to stop an animation from running. It's unaccpetable, and such a blatent example of bad useablity if I ever saw one.

It runs fine on Slackware... you need the flash plugin to run it.

Flash Enabled has a link to a great macromedia Flash HP calculator app that looks and acts exactly like an HP. You'll need to download flash for the Pocket PC here.
There's a stack load of other cool Flash stuff there too. Hope that helps.

It is right in front of your nose, on the macromedia web site. Netscape plugins for alternative operating systems. That's where I got my Solaris (SPARC hardware) plugin, and it works like a champ. Very solid.

1. Sierra puts out (& have put out) a bunch of stuff that involve creative thought. 'The Secret Island of Dr. Brain', 'The incredible machine'(!), plus the others already mentioned.
2. Turn them on to html. Buy any old HTML 4 book w/CD. Use the CD repeatedly. Linux books w/CD usually have an Apache site already set up with the Caldera and Red Hat versions. Building a web site is relatively simple and can give them a chance to strut their stuff, literally. If you are running MicroSoft, the web site software (Option pack 4) is FREE, at you-know-where. If you are using Unix/Linux, the Apache web server software is FREE, too. So is the java stuff at Sun for javaServerPages (JSP). (Free there, too.) Allaire/Macromedia has a FREE JavaServerPages server (with no expiration date for a developer version) at . Have fun!

Macromedia

I don't know what rock you've been living under, but there is (and has been for a while now) a Flash 5 plugin for Linux. Granted it only works in Netscape, and to a lesser extent in konqueror, but it does exist. Go to Macromedia and see for yourself.

Granted you will still get burned by things like Windows Media and Quicktime, but I figure students have better things to do than download movie trailers anyway.

Adobe's a member of the BSA.

The BSA has an interesting statement on the DMCA here. This is a response to a Library of Congress rule available here.

Members of the BSA include Adobe, Apple Computer, Autodesk, Bentley Systems, CNC Software/Mastercam, Compaq, Corel Corporation, IBM, Intel, Intuit, Lotus Development, Macromedia, Microsoft, Network Associates, Novell, Sybase, Symantec, and Walker Digital; i.e. most of /.'s favourite hate companies, plus some extras.

These are the guys to line up against. They've been around since the '80s. I suspect that Adobe's lawyers are all BSA stooges. Certainly Adobe's PR department doesn't seem to be toeing the BSA line.

Actually, it depends.....

On IE, it's an ActiveX control (and so is flash) on NN, it's using both C & Java....at least on the Linux Platform...not sure about others...anyone care to comment?

Relevant code and more details at http://www.macromedia.com/support/flash/ts/documen ts/linux_player_readme.htm

Shockwave is a little different (of course), and from all that I can tell from the FAQ on shockwave.com (http://www.shockwave.com/bin/shockwave/entry.jsp? page=/help/faq_swplayer.html&skip=detection) there's no unix version....on my win2k box now, so can't test....any other experiences to share?

I am assuming that Macromedia followed a similar design philosophy with Shockwave as they did with Flash -- that is, they wrote the plug-in using the best tools for the job, and let's face it, ActiveX is the way to write plug-ins for IE. Of course, you have to re-write the code for other browsers / platforms, but that's a whole other debate, I suppose.

NO SIGS ALLOWED

amazing then that flash works on my linux boxen, under netscape, with no activeX in sight.

shockwave, of course, doesn't.

DATELINE JULY 9, 2001

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Konqueror Embraces ActiveX, Plays Shockwave Movies

July 9, 2001 (The INTERNET). Nikolas Zimmermann and Malte Starostik today announced the availability of reaktivate for Konqueror, KDE's web browser. Reaktivate enables Konqueror to embed ActiveX controls, such as the popular Shockwave movies, for which no native Linux/Unix solution exists. Reaktivate relies on the WINE libraries to load and run ActiveX controls.

With this addition, Konqueror now enables KDE users to take optimal advantage of sophisticated websites that make use of Microsoft Internet Explorer plugins, Netscape Communicator plugins for Linux and Java applets, as well as KDE plugins designed using KDE's KParts technology.

According to Malte, the reason he and Nikolas implemented reaktivate is rather simple: it broadens the spectrum of web sites accessible to Konqueror, and it was possible.

Successes and Limitations

Theoretically, Reaktivate can eventually be used to embed any ActiveX control into Konqueror. Currently, however, not all ActiveX controls are compatible with reaktivate. In particular, the Microsoft Windows Media Player cannot be installed using reaktivate (though it is not known if a player which is already installed will work with reaktivate). Thus it is likely there exist other ActiveX controls which will not yet work with reaktivate. Work is ongoing to increase compatability with other ActiveX controls, including the Apple QuickTime plugin.

So far, however, reaktivate has been successfully tested with the following ActiveX controls:

Note on Security

Install ActiveX controls only from sites that you trust. Microsoft's ActiveX technology has often been criticized for weak security. Those controls are dynamic libraries that are executed exactly like any other piece of code installed on the user's system. This means they have full access to the file system, the system registry etc. As a means to establish the users' trust in the controls a web site wishes to install, every ActiveX control is cryptographically signed and carries a certificate issued by an authority known to the web browser (like VeriSign). A control that has no signature or no certificate or if they are invalid will not be installed.

With reaktivate the situation is similar: the installed controls can call every WinAPI function provided by the WINE libraries and therefore have access to WINE's registry and all files visible to the WINE installation. The current implementation of reaktivate will ask the user for confirmation to install a new control, but it will not check the embedded certificate and signature. This is due to technical reasons as well as limited time. Therefore we strongly advise to install controls only from sites that you trust. To save your files from malicious controls, you might also consider using this feature only from a seperate user account that has no access to your main user's files. Reaktivate will not run from the root account.

Source code for reaktivate is freely available under a Free, Open Source license from the kdenonbeta module in KDE's CVS repository and its mirrors. See the KDE website for information about how to get a module from CVS. You only need the toplevel, admin and reaktivate directories from kdenonbeta. Before compiling, get the latest CVS version of WINE (a snapshot will likely not be new enough). Next, apply all patches from reaktivate/patches-for-wine/ against the WINE sources and build/install WINE. Finally, you can build and install reaktivate.

Disclaimer: reaktivate is not in any manner sponsored or endorsed by, affiliated with, or otherwise related to, Microsoft Corporation.

Thanks to Andreas "Dre" Pour and Navindra Umanee for assisting in drafting this release.

But that's only helpful if Photoshop won't do scripting or batch processing or macros or whatever they would have decided to call it.

Wrong. Not only the Generator option, but the simple fact that Flash can read in a stream of XML just as well as any other client. Same for any kind of flat file. In fact, the very guy that wrote the book reviewed above has a Flash client and Java server setup available for download that demonstrates simple chat using XMLsockets. Wonder what else you could do with that?

there's no on-the-fly loading of images

Wrong again. Just load the shell, then get what else you need as you need it. Load movie ring a bell?

there's no real support

If you're coding a shopping cart in Flash, you shouldn't need any. But if you do... : here's some. Don't worry, that link is good. Check out the other support options if that's not enough for you.

hmmmm....

I noticed the problem too. I went to log on to the macromedia university (hosted through elementk) to get some information off their bookshelves (I paid the 499$ fee for a years access). It's actually on a different server, so had I remembered the address, I might have been ok, but as it was, I couldn't get to the main site www.macromedia.com for that or for any other purposes (The flash and ultradev exchanges). I've never recieved any spam from macromedia, so all Above.net's military-like actions did was remove some users who genuinely needed to get there.

I even sent email to Macromedia asking if their site was down, but they were as confused as I was in their reply. They said they were not showing any problems, but that others had reported the same issues.

Oh well..yet another reason to dislike people with too much power that have no conscience about using it.

They aren't the only ones who find it unacceptable. My personal experience with the macromedia mailing list:

After months of failed mailing attempts from TheEDGE@macromedia.com to 'perina@<<theplacewhereiwork>>.com', an address that is not and was never valid, I decided to stop it. Email-wise, we're a small enough site that I actually keep an eye on all the mail errors and such personally and I'd gotten sick of the fact that Macromedia couldn't take the hint.

So I set up an email alias and wait. Sooner or later, I get a piece of HTML crap in my mailbox from them. No text comments, just pure HTML. Given that I use a normal mail reader instead of some web-enabled POS, this already started to annoy me.

So I dig out the unsubscribe link from the email, http://dynamic.macromedia.com/bin/MM/hub/unsub.jsp . Going there in my web browser of choice, lynx, I discover that, joy of joys, they use Java-fucking-script for their submit button. So now I have to switch over in Netscape just to stop their spam. But that isn't enough -- I still have to first click on their "I forgot my password link", wait for the thing to mail the password, read the mail (which thankfully was plain text, this time), and then go back to the website (which was running horribly slow), and plug in the login and password.

By the time I had finished all of this, I was so pissed at them that I just changed the email address on the account to some random thing @macromedia.com.

All because these bastards couldn't provide address confirmation, bounce checking, or a non-GUI web browser method of unsubscribing from their spam. Macromedia deserves what they got.

Besides, confirming address just makes sense. Our company name is the same as a not uncommon surname, so we get a lot of people doing the equivilant of <john@smith.com>. Also, failing to confirm addresses makes it too easy for people to maliciously engage in signups (as opposed to the numerous ones who just do it out of stupidity).

Heh... doing all the documentation for my programs has corrupted me. I code all my HTML by hand.

Ween them off of Office. Give them Macromedia Dreamweaver. Its user friendly, and other than generating documents with 50% whitespace (thanks to a built-in code beautifier), the HTML is usually pretty good.
And now I look like a macromedia salesman... oh well.

Why not use HTML? I've been using HTML for years for all of my documentation. It works perfectly for a cross-platform manual accessable from anywhere.

If you need powerpoint-type presentations, Flash is easy to use, fast, and readable on nearly all modern browsers. You can even generate it with PHP or PERL.

I'm a raving evangelista, but you really don't need Sorenson for low resolution paper cutouts like South Park. Each character only has a half dozen moving parts and 3 poses (front, side, rear). A Flash animation could do it with BETTER image quality, lower file size, and of course wider compatibility.

Compare to AYB.swf -- Flash works freaking great for animation. Lastly, compare to the classic Star Wars ASCIImation. If you want to talk about "2 Much Time" -- just watching that one for a couple minutes makes me feel like the world's biggest slacker. Imagine the amount of brain drain it took to make the damn thing.

I'm a raving evangelista, but you really don't need Sorenson for low resolution paper cutouts like South Park. Each character only has a half dozen moving parts and 3 poses (front, side, rear). A Flash animation could do it with BETTER image quality, lower file size, and of course wider compatibility.

Compare to AYB.swf -- Flash works freaking great for animation. Lastly, compare to the classic Star Wars ASCIImation. If you want to talk about "2 Much Time" -- just watching that one for a couple minutes makes me feel like the world's biggest slacker. Imagine the amount of brain drain it took to make the damn thing.

Right here.

Flash 5.0. Works in Netscape, Mozilla, and Konqueror.

That's odd. Shockwave for Linux They have a Linux client, wonder why they won't let Netscape on Linux view the site.

Michael

Actually you can get the source to the Macromedia Flash (ie Shockwave) player at no cost.

Sorry bub, you've got a few problems in your assumptions and reasoning there.

1. You say in your first point that flash is not "native, open, [or] standardized". Let's address these one-by-one. First, what do you mean "native"? Native to what? The web browser? Your operating system? Native to a web browser is silly, since they support plugins for the most part (lynx people could define external viewers). Native to your operating system is even sillier, unless you want a kernel module for browsing the web. Most of us run separate programs for doing such mundane tasks, and there are a good number of flash players available for Linux (and other operating systems, of course). Including GPL'd ones.

   Which brings us to the "open" part. Since Macromedia released the Flash specification as an open format, I don't know know what the problem is here. A number of libraries and players (GPL'd either way) have been made. The specification is freely available (I'll leave it up to the lawyers, one of which I am not, to determine all the ins and outs of the SDK licensing agreement, but I don't see anything that requires you keep hush-hush about the file format) for download from Macromedia. (The spec might be available separately as well, but I'll leave the digging up to you.)

   Since we have an open, portable, ported format that seems to have players on major platforms, including GPL'd players, and a Free(tm) tools for developing the format, and since players seem to come default with most installations (MacOS, Win*, Linux), we seem to have something of a standard. Those of you who use text browsers know enough to set an external player to take care of it for you, or ignore a site altogether for the less-motivated users. :-)

   So I fail to see any reality behind your first point.

2. You state that using Flash means you don't care about your customers. Now for me, someone who wanted to provide a nice, well-designed visual and aural site for the common user, and cared, would use something open and standardized, so that everyone could view it. Point one established that Flash qualifies for this. Really caring would find a way to minimize the bandwidth usage, since most people still probably don't have a lot of bandwidth. Since Flash provides nice vector art and a compact format, it qualifies for this as well. So it seems that wanted to design a nice multimedia site and really cared would take the time to do it with Flash, because we all know how buggy JavaScript support is.

   So I fail to see any reality behind your second point, either.

3. Thirdly, you state that using Flash cheats clients, who can't search or use unsupported platforms to visit your site. Since the majority of people are using Win*, MacOS, Linux, or one of the other supported platforms, for the official viewer or for the GPL'd ones, platform support doesn't seem to be an issue. As many people have pointed out, there is no problem with searching, through various methods, so take your pick. There isn't any problem doing forms in Flash, and since you have a Perl module to generate it, there's no reason you can't do it directly either. You think databases are indexable? How much of your site is static and how much is dynamic content? Create an index and submit it to search engines if this is a concern.

   There isn't a problem designing a non-flash site to go along with the flash site as well, for those who for some reason can't upgrade their browser. I'd love to know any reasons why people are stuck below something that can't handle Flash. Resource usage of the viewer is fairly minimal.

   So, well, basically, I can't find any reality behind your third point, either.

4. Finally, you state that using Flash cheats yourself. You can't think of any times that Flash is non-gratuitous. What's wrong with wanting to make a cool-looking site that uses minimal resources and runs on the majority of machines for the vast majority of users?

   XHTML and CSS? The number of platforms and browsers that correctly support these (or even completely support plain HTML) is far fewer than those that support Flash. You'll continue to be plagued by the problems that have always plagued HTML and multiple incompatible browsers. You can't have any client-side dynamicity. JavaScript? Unless you're a complete newbie, which I know you aren't, you know very well that the resources it takes to do in JS what Flash can do, as well as maintain multiple versions of the code for multiple browsers, just isn't worth the time. So, I fail to see how HTML, XHTML, and CSS work better than Flash.

   Now perhaps you'll come back and say that we don't need all that fancy multimedia crap, that back in the day you toggled in bootloaders in octal on the front panel and considered "?" to be a meaningful error message, so what's the point. So why even bother with HTML, XHTML, and CSS? Plain text. FTP those JPEGS or PNG's. Gopher.

   The point is not always to convey raw information. Sometimes, mood and experience are just as important. Sometimes, just having fun is more important. Sometimes those gratuitous graphics and sound aren't really gratuitous at all.

   So, I don't really see any reality behind your fourth point either.

Fact is, Flash works for what it does quite well, better than the alternatives (which are basically JavaScript and Java). It's open, and making it open was the best thing Macromedia could have done for it. If they'd opened it sooner, perhaps thrown in a portable, free authoring tool, it might be even more pervasive and widely-used.

It could be overused, misused, and abused, but so can everything else. I see much less abusive Flash than I do JavaScript and animated GIFs. The point is that it can be well-used, and for some things, it really is the most attractive solution.

• Read Macromedia's own Top 10 Usability Tips for Flash Web Sites to quickly learn how to make your Flash site at least ten times better than the average Flash website.
• Read WebWord's Flash Usability Challenge , co-sponsored by myself, in which a ransom is offered to find a Flash site that is suitable enough for e-commerce to actually make money.
• Read Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox column Flash: 99% Bad for an expert opinion on how Flash makes websites unusable for the average user.

--

I wrote to Macromedia a short time back, asking about the existence/development of a Flash5 player for Linux (could be very important to a project I'm working on) and got back two e-mails...

"At this time, we have not made any public announcements on that."

And this one...

"The following is a link to a third party site that has developer versions of the player for systems such as WindowsCE, UP-UX, BeOS, Amiga, freeBSD & Linux: http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Labyrinth/508 4/flash/download.html For a list of supported platforms, please visit: http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/alter nates/"

Hard to say whether this is encouraging, but at least they didn't say "No, we're not gonna make one."

This gives flash a much higher level of interactivity than it had befor.

You were able to generate flash movies with the "Generator Studio" from Macromeda which costs ~1100$, now one can do similar stuff with perl - for free.

This could mean a great revenue loss for Macromedia, can they do anything to put this off air, after releasing the swf format?

Anyhow, I'm looking forward to play with this.

cheers
mike

The downside is that your UI is locked into a Macromedia standard (at least for the dynamic content), but since your backend will be XML it will be easier to change that later (maybe SVG).

Here are Macromedia's stats on supported platforms. Which include Linux, Solaris, BeOS, IRIX, and Palm.

Also Here is someone who is making it work on CE

It's worth noting that PNG, the format used natively by Macromedia Fireworks, and PNG, the Portable Network Graphics format, aren't exactly the same. Macromedia embeds all kinds of wacky vector, layer, and texture information inside the PNG file (PNG is a raster format), which in other respects conforms to the standard.

You can export plain vanilla PNG files from Fireworks, though. It's really a pretty nifty program.

Those guys probably rejected ads that weren't cool enough.

Yeah, Neville Brody used to do that at The Face.

Last I heard he was working for Macromedia.

It seems that Macromedia's new user interface strategy is to simply copy Adobe.

Definitely. Follow the this link and then follow the link to the Basic features. They have really done their best to copy Adobe.

It's one thing to have tabbed toolbars, and be able to drag/drop them. But it's a whole other game when you do your best to follow Adobe's interface standard of the trashcan icon, visibility, and such for layers, etc. That screen-shot looks like it came from Photoshop.

I think Adobe is not completely in the right, as they are minipulating their patent rights some, and not directly suing over the use like this. But they are persuing someone who is really trying to look/feel like Adobe, and Adobe has some patents they can throw around, so they are.

"Our patent and other aspects of our user interface are key to the user experience and functionality of our products; they are essential to differentiate our products and brand from others."

They should have trademarked their UI, if they want to be able to sue for people not being able to differentiate our products and brand from others that's what trademarks are for.

It's the other way around: The new Macromedia products look a lot like Adobe's. I used Fireworks 1 and 2, and they look nothing like Fireworks 3.

I hope for Adobe's own sake that they didn't doctor the screens (illegal as hell in a lawsuit), but it looks like they didn't. Maybe just moved the palettes into the same position.

It seems that Macromedia's new user interface strategy is to simply copy Adobe.

Flash 5? I guess they didn't like Adobe's easier-to-use LiveMotion, so they had to copy the interface, didn't they? That was one of the reasons LiveMotion is better than Flash 4.

Frank.

MACROMEDIA DENIES ADOBE PATENT INFRINGEMENT CLAIMS

San Francisco, California--August 10, 2000--Macromedia, Inc. (NASDAQ: MACR) announced today that it categorically denies the claims made in a lawsuit filed earlier this afternoon by Adobe Systems Inc. The claim alleges patent infringement relating to user interface features of Macromedia products.

Macromedia believes the claims made in the Adobe lawsuit are without merit. The company believes that U.S. Patent No. 5,546,528 is invalid and unenforceable and that Macromedia does not violate the patent. Macromedia advised Adobe of this belief when first contacted by them in 1996, and readvised them when they last contacted Macromedia in May, 1999.

Talking about patents... EU is about to pass laws making software patents possible in Europe. Check out eurolinux.org's petition to warn European authorities against software patents.

--

Unless I'm mistaken, they're referring to the use of tear-away tabbed toolbars. That's kind of a mouthful, but you can get the idea here.

If you look at the screenshot, you'll note a floating toolbox with a tab at the top which says "layers". The tab can be dragged onto other toolboxes to create customized versions, or torn off of toolboxes if you prefer to give it a space of its own.

I don't recall ever having seen one of these in an application besides those belonging to Adobe and Macromedia, although Painter (now owned by Corel, formerly by Metatools, and before that by Fractal Design) had something similar.

Still, it's obvious at this point that Adobe is pretty desperate. Photoshop still reigns supreme for high-end still image editing and pre-production, but Macromedia is kicking their tail all over the place on the web. To be fair, Adobe LiveMotion looks like a pretty nifty tool (I haven't tried it), but at this point Adobe knows that it's playing catch-up, and doesn't much like it.

If I'm not mistaken, this comes under the heading of "look and feel". Which is fair game ever since that lotus 1-2-3 court case years and years ago.

Besides that...

Tabs are a common feature in current gui's. Adobe should also be suing Microsoft, IBM (OS/2 used tabbed properties palettes), NetObjects, etc., etc. Is Adobe going to argue that the unique invention is the use of tabbed properties palettes in a graphics program, but not in a Operating System?

Macromedia could certainly argue that they were just trying to create an interface that matched the operating system. Then Adobe would have to sue Microsoft / etc. just to show that they are not selectively enforcing the patent (which will invalidate it). That probably wouldn't make much business sense.

For what it's worth, here's macromedia's dull corporate response.

SVG specifications have been evolving for quite some time, and Adobe is one of the companies in the forefront of SVG acceptance. At Adobe's SVG website you can download the SVG plug-in (2.4meg, Win32/Mac) and then see demos of what SVG is capable of. One of the coolest things SVG can do over Flash is client-side image filters, such as marbled textures, flaming text, and embossing, without the user having to download a large raster image.

The biggest problem facing SVG going forward is the strong alliance between Microsoft and Macromedia, the makers of Flash. This alliance lead to the tight integration of Flash in Internet Explorer 5.5. Fortunately Adobe has worked out a deal with Microsoft to automatically download the SVG viewer on-demand in future releases, much like Internet Explorer automatically installs the Flash viewer now.

Personally I think the biggest strength of SVG lies in its text/xml format, because any current HTML generating tool (perl, php, cold fusion, asp) can generate SVG code just as easily.

Very true, but you can do a LOT with lines, text, and area fills. And the files they make are SMALL. Look at Flash--if you're careful, you can make a complete website or fairly complex web app costing about 60k max. (example here, ~68K for a LOT of drawn stuff) It sure as heck will be nice to have scalable vector graphics without having to rely on a plugin.

On an off-topic note, this having been in the works for a while, I can understand Macromedia's moving towards increased interactability with Flash 5.

-s

http://students.washington.edu/steve0/

However, while CorelDraw is definitely the king of vector drawing programs and one of the missing key apps still holding back Linux (no, xfig really does not cut it!)

I think I have to disagree with you there on CorelDraw being the king of vecot drawing programs.

I think that either Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia Freehand are much better than CorelDraw. Sure, they may not be free (actually they're far from it), but it's like comparing Photoshop to The Gimp. The Gimp may be free and a very good program, but I don't think anyone working at a design agency is going to skip the next upgrade of Photoshop to use The Gimp.

andy j. (who works for a design agency, and is using a linux right now, but will go back to the Mac to use the design programs)

Build your own plugin: the Flash player source can be licenced from Macromedia here, as are the libraries for writing your own Flash authoring tool. I'm just finishing off the latter: it's not that hard...
--
Cheers

Get it here