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Flash For The Rest Of Us
antiher0 writes "The first beta of Perl::Flash is done! You can now use Perl to generate flash animations, etc. I've been waiting for something like this to come along :) BTW, be sure to check out the demo page. You can also check out the project breakdown here."
Sorry, I am most unimpressed. Macromedia has a legal right to do this sort of thing, but for users, it's a good idea to turn this sort of thing off and complain to any web master whose site it is an important component of.
Icebox, the creators of Starship Regulars, only has 4 of the episodes online their site. However, they have a flash based game - Starship Shag Shack - Play the game of skill, luck and intergalactic promiscuity.
The article wouldn't be complete without mention of openswf.org. This is where Perl::Flash gets it's backend from. There are also a number of useful Flash tools here as well.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
Heh. Yes. But now those splash pages can give way to extremly well designed and thought out sites which have just as much power as a normal dynamic site.
IMHO, part of the reason that, up until now, flash has only been used for those useless splash pages is that that is all the functionality really allowed for. You couldn't very well build a site in flash when it had a joke as a scripting language and only tenuous, at best, ties to external functions on the site. With PERL and php allowing inroads however, it allows developers like little ol' me to program a site exactly as we would with HTML, only allow for the nice little graphic implementation that my designers are always yelling at me about.
When flash first came out, I thought it was truly going to be revolutionary, until I used it in more of a live (instead of experimental) environment and understood its shortcomings. Even up through flash 5 (which has, in its credit, added a lot of functionality, a better designed internal scripting language, and XML support) it had apparent weaknesses which would prevent it from being used for what is was supposed to do, which was allow you to build a fully programmable and extensible site such as you would in Director, yet allow for small file sizes, quick downloads, and better animation resolution.
"Moving through the masses like a fish through water." syrup
It sounds like you want to say to hell with the new web multimedia formats and for everyone to be surfing in Lynx.
If you want proof that Flash is wonderful, check out WhirlGirl , the baddest superhero in all of SoCal!
Perl has always been good on supporting and integrating with oncoming web technologies. Since i work with both flash 5 and perl, I can say that this is a happy day for me personally, and a happy day for all grahpical inclined web producers everywhere.
better question, now that this is out, does this mean we might see some sort of GPL attached to the flash/shockwave players? IMHO that has been holding back alot of Linux users from being able to experience a great number of excellent looking and functional sites, since they are only capabale of using a beta (and god-awful buggy) player.
"Moving through the masses like a fish through water." syrup
Baloney.
CSS and more-recent flavors of HTML, especially XHTML Basic, were designed to provide greater degrees of separation between content and presentation -- not to further mix the two, as your response suggests! This intertwining of content and presentation is the primary reason that Flash is so destructive when used to express content that could have been expressed in "native" web formats.
Flash prevents the content from being used in its own right. It prevents the use of text-to-speech technologies for sight-impared users, prevents the use of intelligent indexing systems, makes automated classification and compilation next to impossible, and generally flies in the face just about everything sensible that has happened in the last decade to make information more accessible and usable.
For example, the W3C's recently recommended XHTML Basic "allows content to be be shared across desktop computers, TVs, PDAs, pagers, and mobile phones." It makes content more accessible, more usable.
Flash does exactly the opposite. It obfuscates content by hiding it inside of a particular form of presentation.
Once again, Don't use Flash!
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
If you are planning on constructing a Flash site, please DON'T.
Call me old-fashioned, but even with my cable modem I have no patience for goofy animations to download. It slows things down and contributes to Web Bloat.
I've never seen a Flash site that wasn't an abomination. I prefer web sites that are text and static images. Give me the ability to download animations -- don't attack me with them.
I know my crusade is a futile one. I work in the web biz, enterprise level software, and it's sick how many of our clients insist on larding up their sites with useless crap. Especially when you consider how few people have fast connections. The analog modem is still the way of the world...
Thanks,
- B
--
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
SMIL would probably be a more appropriate replacement for Flash. It's also XML-based, and SMIL 1.0 has been a W3C recommendation for over two years.
Squeak Smalltalk also has the ability to work with Flash. You can even play flash animations within the Smalltalk environment. See link below.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Heh -- guess not. Not that ours seems to matter all that much at this point....
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
"Rather than express your content in the Web's native, open, standardized formats, you've hidden you content inside of a non-native, non-indexable, non-searchable format that a good many surfers can't view."
.jpg is indexable? Well you can index the alt tag...so then a web designer would make sure the text from his/her flash movie would be included in a html tag in the page that brings it up. In fact I've used Flash 4 a bit and when you hit publish the .htm file it outputs does exactly that.
And your average
"Forcing them to download the most-recent Flash plugin just for the privelige of viewing your site is presumptious and unrealistic -- many people will just surf to another site, perhaps one of your competitors."
When designing a site you have to assume that the average hit is gonna come from a newer, faster machine. You can't expect the site designer to continue and continue to make site backwards compatible. I know i wouldn't be trying to get a site to look as good in Netscape 1.0 as it does in IE 5. When I design a page I assume that my average visitor is running win98 which happens to include a flash plugin in the install. I figure I'll also get a decent amount of requests from a Win 95 machine and Linux machines. Most of these though would have probably already downloaded the plugin to view other sites in the past but just in case I'll provide a convienient link to tell them where to get it. It is not designers problem if a user can't keep up with technology, he has to go with the majority. As long as the technology is excepted as the norm (which flash seems to be) go ahead and use it.
"Most companies would kill for a few percentage points of market share. But, by using Flash for a client's web site, you'll exclude people with older browsers and unsupported platforms from using your site. These people represent a sizable market share. Do you think your clients don't want these people as customers? Content hidden inside of Flash can't be indexed by search engines. Do you think that you clients don't want people to find their products and services easily?"
See the above solution for the search engine problem. Plus you can't make every user happy it don't happen. And if your service is technology related such as and ISP or Software company, you see customer with out of date equipment as a big Support Hassle.
"I can't think of one instance of where Flash has made a site better. Just about every use I've seen has been gratuitous. People don't surf the web because they want a Rich Immersive Experience."
Image is everything. It's not how great your product is it's how well you can market, display, and how cute it is. Everybody judges a book by it's cover whether they admit it or not. You also forget sites out there that get tremendous amounts of hits for there flash cartoons or games or what not. Heck with out flash we could have that great Napster Bad movie that made me laugh my ass off. There are other good uses to, I generally dislike the intro's but the other stuff it can do is pretty cool.
Just my thoughts,
-Al-
Icebox currently only has 4 of the 6 episodes that the Showtime site has(probably contract agreement or something). Note - you'll need JAVA enabled to use Icebox's site.
As for Macromedia Generator, its still by far the leader in this area as it does more than output Flash
Generator is also expensive and only runs on Solaris and Windows (last time I checked).
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I'm surprised that no-one has mentioned Flashdot, a demo at Swift-Tools' site. According to the blurb, it "...displays headlines of Slashdot (famous techies news site). It uses Perl, LoadMovie, image replacements, dynamic GotoLabel, ..."
The Slashdot of the future? I hope not.
Jobby
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
For those who want to find out more about this, see the SWF info on PHP's site, or grab a copy of libswf (aka Flash Synthisesizer.)
-Waldo
Perl is the language
perl is the program
PERL is no more correct than PYTHON or LINUX
just ask anyone on #perl
...now that Unix/UNIX thing I'm still not sure of...
--
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
So should the new icon for Perl now be an overflowing sink instead of the camel? (Or has someone re-written emacs in Perl instead of Lisp?)
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
Sigh. Okay, let's take 'em one by one...
You're right, JPEG images are not indexable. And that's why I wouldn't take a block of text (or other useful content), render it into a JPEG image, post it on a site instead of the text itself, and try to cover up my stupidity by stuffing the text in the image's ALT attribute. Yet that's exactly what a bunch of folks who use Flash do. They convert useful information, sometimes entire site hierarchies, into a less accessible, less useful form (Flash), and substitute that weakened content for the real thing.
No you don't.The fact is, most people don't have the latest-and-greatest hardware and software. Making this assumption is not only contrary to fact, it's cheating yourself, your customers, and your clients. Rather than figuring out how to solve problems in terms of standard, web-native technologies that almost everybody on the Internet can use, you've chosen to make an assumption that makes your life easier at great cost to everybody else.You're right about one thing. If a designer designs sites under the assumption that users will "keep up with technology," it's not his problem -- it's his users' problem and his client's problem. They're the ones that will suffer for his laziness.
And good designers do ensure that their sites are backwards compatible. For example, Amazon's designers made sure that you can buy books via Lynx if you want. They get it: Their content matters, and their designers make sure that the content rules, not the presentation (or their own egos).
Image is not everything. If you look at the companies that live or die based on their web presence, the ones that must truly "get" the web in order to survive, you'll see that they almost universally avoid Flash. Do you need Flash to buy a book from Amazon? Or post to Slashdot? Or participate in projects on Sourceforge? Or trade stocks on E*Trade? Nope. Are you seeing the big picture yet?
Remember: It's the content that counts! Everything that gets in the way, including Flash, is damaging to your users and your clients.
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
First, Let me tell you who I am. I'm the owner/runner of 2shortplanks.com. This summer I gave the talk on Perl and Flash at YAPC::Europe. I've read and used the code.
;-) Good job we got that unlimmited bandwidth option from mailbox.
;-)
;-)
Secondly, to all those people trying to see the demos. The machine load is currently at 30 - you may have to wait a bit
Thirdly, Simon (the authour of this code) is on holiday, snowboarding - So he can't speak to you lot, but I'll have a go at talking about where we were in the project before he left.
Simon did this code for his final year project based on an idea that I came up with but I was too lame to implement. Up to this point we are at a stage where we can sucessfully break apart a Flash movie with pure perl, and hold it as a data structure of vector graphics objects (well as SWF tags such as Rect, Shape, Text) that can be altered by access via attributes.
This has been a hard struggle for many reasons. Macromedia's open spec (which is linked elsewhere in this discussion) has many bugs in it that Simon had to work around. The other main difficulty is that Flash is a bit based file format, rather than a byte based format - read the spec and you'll see what I mean. (In other words you have 'tags' that take up less than a whole byte so you have to parse very slowly...) Simon had to write File::Binary (on CPAN) before he could start.
Simon has half done the creating perl code bit in pure perl. At this point the code is written, but isn't debugged. I don't think Simon or I am going to even attempt to do this as we've reached the point where it's logical to throw the code away and start from fresh (look mom, the evolutionary design model!) There's lots of changes we'd like to make - processing unparsed data - moving away from Class::Struct - rewriting the File::Binary to work better - template toolkit scripting ability.
One of the really cool things that Simon has done is wrap a binary library to spit out simple flash files. Unfortunatly this module is free as in beer, not as in speech (read: we don't have the C source code.) It has bugs that we can't fix, but this works in most cases - I prepared the slides for my talk at YAPC::Europe with it, as well as the demos that you, well, will be able to see the slashdot effect dies down.
Simon has been doing all this work in his spare time of late - which is very demanding. Sure, if someone was to offer him to work on it fulltime (*hint*) then a lot more could be done. At this time I'd like to thank Simon for all the hard work, often largely thankless, that he's done on this and other projects (YAPC::Europe, Acmemail, and countless help on other modules)
Now for a little news on the server itself. It wasn't ready to be slashdotted. The load is at 30 for goodness sake! Hooray for Linux not falling over! The code wasn't set up to be put under any kind of load - it's just beta code for discussion that has *no* respect for what it's running on. It should be running under mod-perl. It's not. It should not be using file-based temporary files. It is. It's a work in progress, what do you expect?
In closing I'd just like to say it's a shame that we haven't had a chance to get this into some kind of workable form before the whole world decided to have a look and judge it. The site was thrown up in a rush (arn't they always) for discussion on the list. It would have been set up a lot better if we'd known the traffic we were about to get) and we'd love to have shown you a lot more.
Are you slashdot editors willing to let us have another go on the slashdot rollercoaster ride of server death in three months when we've got everything up to scratch? Go on, I dares you
Hope that's been informative.
If you need any info on this then feel free to email me on mark@twoshortplanks.com and I'll be more than willing to talk over any issues. Though I'm in the UK and it's 12:30 in the morning on a Friday night atm, so don't expect a prompt reply!
Later.
Mark.
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
The idea is that Flash is a really interesting technology -- vector graphics, lighweight complex animations, yadda yadda yadda -- but you need proprietary tools to work with it, and the integration with the web browsers is spotty at best -- e.g. they aren't searchable, they don't really support all the standard features like the back button, etc.
That's where Perl::Flash comes in. First & foremost, it's an authoring tool for generating (either one-at-a-time or dynamically-on-the-fly) Flash animations, but I would suspect that it can also be used -- perhaps in Mozilla? -- for other types of manipulation of the Flash file. Cool stuff.
I've just learned that this hasn't been officially released yet -- Simon's on vacation -- so those of you that can get to the twoshortplanks site are seeing experimental code that wasn't yet meant for public review like this. Keep that in mind as you review this stuff -- beta isn't even nearly the word for the code here, so don't be hard on Simon and don't be cruel in pointing out flaws in the code or the ideas: everything is a work in progress at this point.
Whoever this 'antiher0' person is, s|he has revealed this project perhaps a bit too soon....
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I wonder if anyone's really thought about its security? Is there even any? Now that's it's becoming easier to dynamically create, can Flash exploits be far behind?
--
You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
First, I want to make it clear that I have nothing against the fine hackerly work that is Perl::Flash.
But Flash, itself, is just plain evil. Don't use Flash. Ever.
Why?
So, just in case you didn't get the point: Don't use Flash!
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
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
A|Q|U|A
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
- 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.
Finally, whatever you do, remember there's a reason why words and characters are so rarely "animated" in the real world. And please don't forget the "Skip Intro" button.--
PERL is practically evolving into an operating system in itself, supporting ::Telnet, ::Ping, and loads of other file-and-network functions available through CPAN. It only seems natural that .SWF is moving into PERL, considering the growing support its obtaining in other platforms. (I just which the sounds-syncing features in the Linux driver I use would sync correctly in the Mondo Mini-shows I catch each week. Instead, they play like chipmunks on speed.)
Perhaps a standard for the platform will come about, similar to PC2001 specs. The current generation of Palms would likely not make the cut, but the next likely would.
Seven Comments, and this site is already Slashdotted to the point of non-functionality. While this code is in beta, it brings about the point of server overhead.
Is this going to be like any of the various servlet engine that can bring a good, hard server to its knees? Is it going to eat all my RAM and CPU cycles like a pothead at TacoBell?
This *looks* like a damn neat thingy, but I'm scared to run it now.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Now thousands of PERL users can program Flash to generate completely useless splash pages.
Dammit. Sharkey
www.badassmofo.com
SVG is the shit. If you look at the spec, there's MANY differet ways of minimizing code, and yes, there is sound support(I haven't goofed off with it though).
I just wish there was more documentation on SMIL animation. I don't think that part of the spec is complete, but right now the canidate recommendation for SVG as it stands is very usable(november spec).
I'm just waiting for someone to take the SVG spec to the limit by making a first person shooter using the filter effects and such to its max. Of course, that might overwhelm the Adobe SVG viewer.
Michael Dorn (Worf in Star Trek) and Diedrich Bader(Oswald on the Drew Cary show) do some of the voices.
Works great using the OS/2 flash plugin too.
http://www.php.net/manual/ref.swf.php.
also check out swift-generator - also perl based. Quite possibly the coolest .swf based tool of all.
- daniel
- daniel
Turn off your computer and go outside
Flash is a binary coded, obfuscated, proprietary format owned and controlled by Macromedia. It's difficult to program for, supported only on select platforms, only with non-free plugins and utilities etc.
Use SVG, an open standard which aims for wide support, based on XML with a very strong underlying rendering model. It rocks.
\end{rant}quick, delete the post.
Taco's gonna see this, well actually just the word PERL and we are all done.
No more "Standards are important for the web" Articles, just rotating logos all over slashdot. And an fscking intro, NOOOOOOO
Oh the humanity.
Well, it's probably to late allready.
"Mommy, mommy! The garbage man is here!" "Well, tell him we don't want any!" -- Groucho Marx