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Feeling Frightfully Forever Flashless?
ghost_crab asks: "After finally getting the guts to fdisk all my M$ problems away, I find myself happier and less stressed. Now all I want for Christmas is a good, solid Flash editor, a la Macromedia's Flash, or even Adobe's Live Motion, neither of which run well with WINE. I have queried both companies for projected *nix releases, and both have instead emphatically supported the EvilEmpire. A search with Google and of SourceForge gives one little hope. Is anyone working on Flash for Linux? Open Source or Not - I would be thrilled to pay for a good Flash Editor. Is there hope for those of us who claim to be graphic designers yet cannot stomach Windows for even one more day?" Is there anyone out there working on replacements for the plugins that are only available for Windows?
Flash support on Linux has always been questionable for me. I can get it to work in Netscape Communicator. Mozilla doesn't seem to want to recognize the plugin and Konqueror? Well, Konqueror just locks up hard when it encounters Flash content...either that or it throws up lots of windows when it tries to go to Macromedia's site, which bothers me to no end. Unless other OSes gain access to richer-than-HTML-content, their users will slowly find themselves left behind in a web that's becoming more and more centered on Win32-only content, which would not be a good thing.
Well, if it's windows you really must avoid and you need *nix why not move to macosx? There is a port of all of the good Graphics/Video tools to macos. Yea your gonna have to get a new computer but you would get your flash and not be in windows.
(Score:0, Interesting)
In response to Cliff's comment I've had good success with Codeweavers Cross-Over plugin on Navigator and Konqueror. It works in Mozilla, ie, it doesn't crash, but the video is screwed up.
But ghost crab was mostly asking for an editor, not a plug-in. Let me add Authorware to the list of needed editors.
Because Cliff added it to the submission. I just started using Konqueror, and have been quite annoyed at the macromedia pop up windows (thought I hit a porn site accidentally the first time it happened). How/where do I disable this?
Yes, I am too lazy to RTFM and do a Google search.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
In case nobody reads what ghost_crab wrote, I'll point this out. He's not looking for a Flash plugin for his browser. He's looking for a Flash authoring tool.
With the SWF format being semi-open, I don't see any technical reason someone couldn't build this.
Yes, I agree, sence moving to Linux, I havn't gotten flashed once!
BURN KARMA BURN!
I'm sure flash is useful for something, but I've never had a flash plug in on my computer and never missed it. Lynx works great for 95% of the web sites I work with, and the rest are either broken (you must have javascript and a 4.x browser to use, even though if I manually bypass those warnings it works), or accually have content that relys on graphics.
Do you really need flash? Are you sure. I'm sure there are people who will answer yes. I wouldn't expect a artist to produce anything that is useful to the blind, and I wouldn't expect their websites to work without images. The are likewise similear examples of other catagories that need extra content. Most places that have flash don't have anything to do with something that needs it.
Not sure that I care, but I'm sure there is someone out there who cares enough to work on that endeavor. Try searching on that-- and maybe that will be the road to solving your dilemma. Or, like previous posters, just buy a Mac and be free of the evil empire and have a pretty decent box.
"You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas"
Sen. Davy Crocket to US Congress, Nov. 1, 1835
There are a few libraries floating around that are quite functional, Ming is one, libswf is another. These libraries provide functions that create flash objects in code, i.e. createCircle() or whatever. We just need to wrap an editor around them. The problem is that vector graphics are usually somewhat complex mathematical beasts, especially when designing an UI to directly manipulate them.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
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.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
One title "Throwing your poo at kids in the zoo" from bitemymonkey.com. Best thing i've seen in ages!
Odd. It Just Worked for me. I've been using the flash plugin in Mozilla since 0.8 or so without too many problems. In fact, the only major problem I have it that it hangs the browser if another application has /dev/dsp open and a flash movie
tries to do sound until the first app is closed.
Oh, and of course it doesn't work on my non-x86
Linux boxen (currently Sparc and Alpha). But I
don't really miss flash enough to bothered to
try Olivier Debon's free flash plugin.
As others have pointed out, there are options
for flash authoring under Unix, but I can't say
I've needed to use them (but then I've never yet come
across a web site that benefited from having
flash).
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
considered harmful,
not evolutionary:
web neanderthal.
anarchy rules
How, exactly, is this off-topic?
The poster of the article in no way emphasized any desire to move to Linux except as a means of getting away from Microsoft. The Macintosh is a viable solution that allows one access to a wide range of multimedia products including several Flash development tools while avoiding the Evil Empire. You can get both Macromedia Flash and Adobe GoLive for the Mac without allowing MS software to touch your system. (...with the exception of IE, which takes all of 5 minutes to delete after you've download OmniWeb or Mozilla.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
If you want to be able to produce flash from code, php has an excellent libswf module written by Paul Haeberli. The docs are located here. Of course, this doesn't give you a fancy gui to develop from, but it is flexible :)
Macromedia has the full SWF File Format SDK on their website. Now get crackin! I expect a beta version on my desk in a week!
From the point of view of an animation tool, I would say, Flash is good - but flawed. Also, as an alternative to java applets for a slicker web experience, it is also flawed. Version 5 was a disappointment, since all my original gripes aren't dealt with at all.
I don't know much about the downloadable file format and its limitations, but my guess is that a fresh design has the potential to address these flaws, if not remove them completely. Or maybe that would require rewriting the file format?
Hmmm... maybe the solution is some sort of Java Bean that plays Flash movies? Or is Java too slow?
These are my criticisms - they turned into a bit of a rant, sorry - Flash isn't all bad,just annoyingly imperfect. Note, I've never used Adobe's Live Motion, or Macromedia Generator.
-
Shape Tweening:
This is potentially a wonderful timesaver. But if you try anything trivial, it just won't do what you expect. Even a straight line tweened into another straight line is unpredictable - the choice of which end morphs into which is decided by the editor application - apparently it maps each end of the initial line to the nearest of the final line. So, you can have it morphing one way, then move an end slightly and suddently it'll switch.
- Forms:
Another use of Flash which seems attractive is as a form of applet. Then, as well as looking a bit nicer, the form could cache data internally, and exchange only those chunks it needs to with the server via XML (which Flash5 supports). Potentially an online form would be much less clunky, and more like a standard GUI.
- Finally, the scripting - although it is mostly like javascript,it isn't quite the same, and has some very funny and undocumented scoping rules, which makes for some puzzling problems where variable x doesn't contain what you want it to, and you can't figure out why. And there is only rudimentary "print" style debugging available - so, any scripting is going to be time consuming because bugs are so easy to introduce and hard to find.
So - I probably won't get aroud to all this, but maybe some selfless sub-genius soul can do it all for nothing by next week?This problem is only slightly alleviated by the use of shape hints.
Basically, Flash tries to be too clever. It allows you to draw a shape with any number of control points, then it chooses the mapping from initial points to final points. Where this is not a one-to-one mapping it adds in points mid-morph. And one point can be mapped to two totally disparate final points. So, while a circle morphed into a square is an intuative thing to imagine, Flash may decide to morph the circle into one side of it, and have three other circles spring out from nowhere to make up the other sides. And when you get it to work, it's fragile - a slight slip and suddenly shape A morphs into shape B via a cloud of garbage. Using it to tween a walk cycle is a recipe for disaster - I don't bother any more.
So - it's fine for making some text dissolve into a cloud of polygons which reassemble themselves into something else. But that's about it.
How I would suggest it should be done is this: draw a starting shape, whatever you like. Select it, and copy it to the final frame of the morph, turning on tweening. Then modify the final version - this ensures that the number of points is constant and the choice of which morphs to which is obvious, controllable, and intuative.
Also, potentially it could improve session security by allowing client-side encryption and, hashing.
There are several problems with this: although form components (combo boxes, radio buttons, etc.) are available, they are unresizable without a redrawing all the internals. The scripting cannot manipulate graphics primitives, only movie clips, so they cannot be generated on-the-fly. A button cannot be duplicated with different text, it has to copied and manually changed. Basically the all GUI controls I've seen don't hide their complexity.
Use of other scripting languages would be nice, and presumably this could piggyback on the debugging tools available for them. This is where flash would really benefit from the pooled efforts of its users. Plus, server-side scripting tools like SWIFT would allow you to generate components on the server, relieving the graphic designer from having to redraw virtually the same component many times.
Macromedia's Flash Plugin is horribly broken when using Linux thin clients with both LTSP.org and Solucorp's XTerminals package. It causes all versions of Mozilla to segfault by the 1st or 2nd page that uses Flash. Netscape works sometimes, but is unstable and crashes with segfaults too. Konqueror either locks up, or crashes displaying the KDE segfault dialogue window.
Strangely, Opera 6.0 beta 1 and beta 2 seem mostly stable with Macromedia's plugin, however I can't use Opera due to lack of Japanese input support and I rather not buy 50 licenses of Opera for the thin clients.
Has anyone found a workaround for this problem? Macromedia hasn't released an update for their plugin since January 2001, and several KDE and Linux Terminal Server folks have reported this problem to Macromedia without hearing anything in return.
Actually two different issues here - the first is the solution to your Flash content authoring needs in Linux (congrats on that final fdisk btw ;-). The second regards the current scarcity of polished plug-in support to actually render your work in non-Iexplore browsers.
/." about building a PC for an artist (graphic designer = artist) that contains comments regarding Mac OSX you may find useful in your quest as a M$ free artist.
2nd issue first: There are many programmers out there working tirelessly on open source browser and OS alternatives for us (thanks guys) but there is much so much work to be done yet so one way to help is to donate money and hardware (like say old i386 stuff) to open source organizations like mozilla, KDE, etc. to aid them in further development of plugins that actually work the way they should - remember these are all works in progress and they are competing with some pretty deep pockets.
1st issue second: I have a couple of possible directions here for you to poke around: Don't forget you can run Solaris, SGI, HPUX binaries too (at least I can on my FreeBSD machine - so probably Linux too) and there may be some cool (albeit commercial and pricey) stuff available that route although I alas can only make the suggestion - perhaps someone else has experience with this? As a fellow graphic designer turning geek this is on my list of things to play with one of these days as I gain time/knowledge.
Secondly I don't want to troll, but I would refer you to another very interesting "ask
no sig
I don't like flash because, specifically, the tools cost an arm and a leg, and are completely owned by one company.
Javascript, on the other hand, is a publically available language that can potentially do everything that flash can.
However, javascript on Netscape is like Javascript on IE's retarded parapalegic brother. By comparison, it is capable of doing about half as many things. Plus, the language is far more strict and has undocumented problems. I sincerely wish that Microsoft would port IE to Linux. Of course, if they did, I'd have no real reason to use Windows.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!