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.

Comments

Re:No, not the plugin

[Matts]

The reason isn't technical.

It takes a long time to write software like this, and often it takes a number of people working closely together. In short, this isn't something that is just going to work by putting together a sourceforge project and hoping people will come along and help - it's going to take dedicated effort, and that will probably come in the form of a closed source proprietary company taking the stand and doing it.

Personally though I'd look more towards SVG, and hope someone can do a good SVG->Flash converter. You'd lose sounds (since SVG doesn't do sound natively, though you could do it with SMIL, which is supported in Real One). If Real and Adobe got together and combined their SVG plugin and Real player you'd have a pretty kickass low bandwidth vector graphics + sound + animation system. Unfortunately that still leaves us waiting for an authoring system...

We already have the low-level tools

[billcopc]

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.

Re:Mozilla and flash plugin

[Ex Machina]

I run the flash plugin in galeon and i found that utilizing esd gets rid of the /dev/dsp problem.