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

No, not the plugin

[Ratbert42]

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.

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...

Some hope on the horizon

[orangesquid]

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.

Flash: 99% Bad

[brlewis]

Agreed. People choosing flash should read Jakob Nielsen's column, Flash: 99% Bad. Among other problems, he mentions the way it breaks web fundamentals:

• The "Back" button does not work. If you navigate within a Flash object, the standard backtracking method takes you out of the multimedia object and not, as expected, to the previous state.
• Link colors don't work. Given this, you cannot easily see where you've been and which links you've yet to visit. This lack of orientation creates navigational confusion.
• The "Make text bigger/smaller" button does not work. Users are thus forced to read text in the designer-specified font size, which is almost always too small since designers tend to have excellent vision.
• Flash reduces accessibility for users with disabilities.
• The "Find in page" feature does not work. In general, Flash integrates poorly with search.
• Internationalization and localization is complicated. Local websites must enlist a Flash professional to translate content. Also, text that moves is harder to read for users who lack fluency in the language.