Slashdot Mirror

Maybe OSS should actually be pushing for Silvelight to win, as you can at least create Silverlight content in notepad for free, and aren't forced to buy a massive Adobe illustration package just to put a few pretty buttons or videos on your site.

Never heard about Ming, haven't you?
Ok there is no fancy GUI but you can create some SWF contents with your notepad...
Look to the examples here. I found a page with a lot of very nice examples, but I can't remember where...

One very useful tool for generating .swf is the ming library, which can be used in conjunction with AutoTrace and ImageMagick to convert just about anything to .swf.

There is an open source alternative to flash. It is called Ming. Why not try it. Maybe help with it. And stop using Flash.

Have you checked out Ming which allows PHP to generate custom Flash movies on the fly?

Phillip.

There are a few tools for Flash and Open Source, but they are pretty much code oriented. The first is Ming, which can be found at:

http://www.opaque.net/ming/

The second is libswf, created by SGI. I'm not sure of the status of the license, but the source _is_ available.

ftp://ftp.sgi.com/sgi/graphics/grafica/flash/

Both libraries are accessible from PHP.

As far as vector tools, Sodipodi is an incredibly cool vector editor. Unfortunately, at this time it is only svg, but you may find it useful.People have for quite a while wanted flash for sodipodi, and all one has to do is tie the Open Source flash libs to the UI. But nobody has done it. Read a post about it on the Sodipodi web site.

I hope you find this helpful.

You whiners shaddap. The question was asked, and instead of whining about how bad Flash is, just answer the friggin question.

So, here's my answer:

Get Apache, PHP, and the Ming libraries, located at http://www.opaque.net/ming/.

Ming lets you create Flash animations from within PHP that can be either saved (to reduce CPU load of regenerating the flash each time) or dynamically written so you can do things on-the-fly with it.

I used it to write up some crappy animations on my home page for my relatives to see.

Part of the problem with flash is it's overused, and the audio makes the apps take forever to load.

For some really nice examples of what you can do with flash, take a look at joecartoon.com.

I agree that sometimes Flash is pretty annoying, but for certain types of applications I can understand why someone might want to use it. Don't flame this guy for investigating what might be appropriate options for his purposes, especially since there are tools such as Ming for PHP, which allow you to generate some pretty goddamned cool-looking Flash files without owning the Macromedia authoring program. Did I mention it's open source?

I have found two Flash content generation products -- SWIFT and Ming.

From swift-tools.com :
Swift-Generator is a Dynamic Flash? Content generator. It aims at dynamically replacing texts, fonts, sounds, images and movie clips in either a Template file or a standard Flash? file. It can also dynamically change action parameters in either frames or buttons.
This allows Webmasters to create dynamic content such as stock-exchange values, sport scoring, weather values, news tickers and the like. Swift-Generator only requires an authoring tool like Macromedia® Flash? 4 or 5. Once a Flash? file is created, Swift-Generator is able to handle it.

This will only work for filling in templates, but its definitely a start... perhaps SWIFT-tools will release a full editor in the future?

From opaque.net:

Ming is a c library for generating SWF ("Flash") format movies, plus a set of wrappers for using the library from c++ and popular scripting languages like PHP, Python, and Ruby.

Ming is just a library, but perhaps somebody will develop a graphical front-end for it in the future.

... you may as well use one of the most commonly installed one. Using Ming you can generate Flash on the fly using PHP. Most popular plug-in + most popular scripting language = common sense to me!

Phillip.

There's a project called ming. It is an open-source library that produces SWF (Flash) files on the fly. It is quite early in the development, but it's already very useful. A few months ago I decided to write a converter from an XML-based format into SWF The XML's tag set was modeled very closely upon Ming's inteface, so it was really closer to a wrapper. I called my program xml2swf.

Anyway, at an early step in the development I became stuck. The problem was that I wanted to know where I'd moved an object (on the screen) previously. This information is stored in the library anyway, thought I, so there must be a way of getting it out.

Well, I was wrong. The structs which contain the position are hidden behind opaque pointers. So I could either compile my program with knowledge about ming's internals (unelegant), store the information on my own (inefficient and long) or to offer a small patch to ming's developers so that it would provide accessor functions.

Naturally, I chose the third approach. However noone responded me. It was a month ago; ming still doesn't have accessor functions, xml2swf is in deep freeze and I'm thinking about other projects where I could encounter more cooperative developers.

It's name is ming: http://opaque.net/ming Ming - an SWF output library and PHP module Ming is a c library for generating SWF ("Flash") format movies, plus a set of wrappers for using the library from c++ and popular scripting languages like PHP, Python, and Ruby. It's multi-platform and it runs very nice on Linux. So now the Linux guys can write SWF movies without the flash authoring program. Enjoy. I'm also running a forum to support it here.

First of all a large majority of the people here talking about Flash really don't have any clue what they are talking about. I am currently working on a number of Flash 5 related books, and let me tell you, there is a HELL of a lot more to Flash than most people know... full OOP language, XML, socket connections... the list goes on.

This perl lib is nice and all, but its based on the same library that the basic PHP library is, and really isn't that big of a deal... it outputs Flash 3 files!

If you want cutting edge open source tech for Flash go check out Ming

Ming is a library for PHP, Python and Ruby that really kicks some serious ass!

As for Macromedia Generator, its still by far the leader in this area as it does more than output Flash... it also spits out JPG, GIF, QT, PNG, and Mac/PC exe's. It's more than a dynamic Flash solution, it is a dynamic graphics solution. Think PHP for images. It also has a very powerful plugin architecture based on Java.

Also, I run a mailing list for people who program inside of Flash 5: FlashCoders