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Microsoft To Acquire Macromedia?
perly-king-69 writes "The Register is reporting that 'industry sources' say that Microsoft have Macromedia in their sights. Whilst it could just be holiday gossip, if they do pull it off it could have a significant impact on the cross-browser compatibility of Flash applications."
Too bad for Microsoft that Macromedia documented and made the SWF format open a long time ago now. Even if they pulled the flash player from any platform except IE on Windows, we still have libflash.
As it is now, flash is a relatively open format, there's just no good OS flash players. But if Microsoft were to acquire them, I think flash would remain an open format for about 30 seconds. Then only Mac OS and Windows users would be able to browse a very significant portion of the web.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
...what effect would this have? It could go either way - the Mac/Linux/Mozilla users, who are in the minority, would be disgruntled by this, and would either give in, or just not visit sites that choose to use a proprietary format.
.NET is usable by anyone, but MS gets to declare what the standards are. Perhaps MS are actually becoming a little more honest, on the face of things?
IMHO, any proprietary format on the Internet is bad. Flash is all very well for doing supplementary things (games etc) but not for features essential to the operation of a website. Common sense would tell you not to use Flash for content provision, but people seem to think otherwise.
It is most likely, however, that either this deal will not go ahead, or that MS will keep the standard fairly open. Remember, MS are moving towards semi-open standards -
Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.
... and disturbing, since Flash is finally becoming an interesting and useful way to deliver content over the Web instead of an annoying tool to do things that could better be done in plain HTML and maybe JavaScript.
But I don't think it's the whole story. If Microsoft acquires Macromedia, they also get their graphics tools, which, while much less widely used than Adobe's, are generally well-regarded. Ggraphic artists have been talking for years about how nice it is to work in an area not dominated by Microsoft (and yes, Adobe can be just as evil -- but let's be practical here; they just don't have the raw power Microsoft does.) This could be Microsoft's bid to swallow up the last major area of the desktop market they don't yet dominate.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
For those of you born yesterday here is a recap: Microsoft bought Liquid Motion back in the late 90s. It was actually a contender for about 3 months but Flash quickly surpassed it. Microsoft quietly concedes this battle. Then around 2000 Microsoft acquires Visio. Again, pushing the visualization theme here. About this time they also come out with a very capable Photodraw application that even uses Adobe Photoshop plug-ins. Clearly Microsoft hungers for visualization software in it's portfolio. And Dreamweaver is kicking FrontPage's ass. It should be no surprise to anyone that Microsoft wants Macromedia. With this piece of the puzzle they could finally off Adobe and their pesky little PDF format.
I can only hope that try try and charge way too much for it, and get rid of it. Or maybe companies won't want to risk losing a little business from the people who still don't use Explorer. Either way, if I can see less flash on the web, I will be happy. It takes too long to download, and I really don't like flashy looking webpages, when I am just trying to find some information.
What ever will we do without flash? I mean, it works so well with Linux as it is, how could we possibly live without it?
My first web development platform was Drumbeat, which became Dreamweaver Ultradev, which became Dreamweaver MX. Everyone I know who uses both MX and Visual Studio .NET still prefers MX for the majority of their database-driven web development. I'd love to have MX's ease of use and powerful design support built into Visual Studio.
What's your damage, Heather?
This might spell boon for the lacklustre .NET initiative???
MS would benefit from cross-browser compatibility because that would give more reason to use the MX line for development. The SERVER technology is where they would benefit, by making Flash remoting work natively with .NET, requiring windows for Coldfusion MX, etc.
Flash is the epitomy of cross browser and would be an extremely power tool in getting more windows machines in the server room.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
Yes they are innovative! They created the web browser...er...they created that really neat program Visio...er...they created the office suite...er...they created the GUI...er...
-------
Bite Me Fanboy!!
M$, innovation through acquisition.
I am not sure what effect this will have on the web. Coldfusion is a direct competitor to ASP. I would think this would raise issues with the monopolies watchers.
The biggest selling point of flash (well if you listen to Macromedia) is its cross browser/cross platform capability. M$ would surly cut down on this. Which would make flash less attractive.
I thought that Macromedia were trying to push flash on PDAs and Smartphones, this would probably restrict it to M$ powered PDAs/Smartphones.
So this could lead to a upsurge in flash as IE would become integrated with it. Which would make the web unusable for non M$ browsers, or it could diminish the use of flash as it becomes a M$ only technology.
Microsoft acquiring Flash would be bad enough, but having them get ahold of Dreamweaver would be even worse. It's a far superior product to Frontpage, but if good ol' Bill were to get his hands on it, I'm sure it would either be disregarded or simplified/downgraded to the point where it's nothing more than a Frontpage clone. This is bad. Very. bad.
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
nobody said Macromedia would be willing to be bought out..
Maybe this will be one of those technologies MS buys just so it won't go anywhere in usage or development. I would not be saddened by such a thing. Am I the only ones who is sick of flash splash pages to websites? Just give me my content damnit. :)
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
This is GOOD NEWS! I hate flash. If it weren't for flash, I wouldn't have to view so many damn ads in my Mozilla browser. I've done everything I can to uninstall flash, including deleting every nwswf.dll (or whatever it's called, I forget) file on my computer, deleting the Windows/Macromedia directory, etc. But I still get those damn flash ads. Please, Micro$oft, remove the cross-browser capability of flash. Then I can surf in peace with Mozilla. (The .001% of the time that I want to view a flash display, I'll use IE for that.)
I was kind of hoping those annoying Flash advertisements would be banished from Mozilla.
"And like that
when someone buys you, you don't have a lot of say over shit....especially if it's a hostile takeover.
furthering
It would be sad to see another innovator get gobbled up, I've been impressed with macromedia since the ol' Director days, it just seems shitty when a big guy buys up a brand or name then tries to pawn it off as their own.
The saddest example of late is Infogrames trying to ride the name recognition of Atari of all things! WTF? LOL
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
don't forget than macromedia is also in front line with adobe for imaging so Adobe will see this kind of acquisition has very hostile ...
More, if Ms does it (which i don't think; more christmas gossips), they could wipe all Macromedia software from Mac as extra from wiping java from their softs.
I'll kill myself if this takes place. If I'm not mistaken, they'd have to make some serious mods to ColdFusion or sell it because MS cannot distribute any Java based tech. without consulting with Sun first due to the lawsuit. There goes the tight Flash integration.
On a bright side, I'm glad CF's power is finally recognized:
"The ColdFusion web application server is regarded as superior to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASPs) and even Santa Clara, California-based Sun's Java Server Pages (JSPs) because of its simplicity, power and completeness. ColdFusion MX, meanwhile, uses ColdFusion Mark-up Language (CFML) tags that compile to Java."
First Borland, then Rational and now MacroMedia.
...Better check who I've been sold to...
What's next? SUN, CNN-TimeWarner-AOL, W3C, OSDN, GNU, Linus?
--
The world is run by idiots because they're more efficient than hamsters
As someone who works in a Cold Fusion shop, I can say this wouldn't be a good thing, despite all the "yay, kill Flash!" posts.
Cold Fusion is much, much easier to develop and deploy web apps for than ASP or JSP.
Microsoft should be happy with just being the number one software company...why do they need to rule the world too?
I agree. Flash is like a pervasive virus. If I could find a way to disable it in Galeon for good, it would be gone.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
Suppose that some "public interest" suggestion could be put to bear on MS acquiring companies in related fields....
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Respect and admiration? ...for Microsoft?
You're new here, aren't you...
This would not be a bad thing. Now to get rid of animated gifs, who do they need to buy up and lock only into IE to spare us from those?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If that would happen', what is the posibility for flash to surive?
.NET.
It's just one step less if you wanna force down
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
And a rumor posted on The Register at that. I'll believe this when I see it confirmed somewhere that doesn't appear to be cribbing from the Reg or Slashdot.
This also assumes Macromedia wants to be bought by Microsoft, even if MS is attempting a hostile bid Macromedia may go looking for a white knight.
I could see IBM, Adobe, or Sun ending up with Macromedia in the end.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
they judge wasn't harsher on them..oh well, they'll soon have adobe filing an anti-competition case. should i start up the web-petition now?
At least the war on the environment is going well
Anyways, I'd be more worried about cross-platform compatibility for anything with a Mac OS preference or that Apple is the vendor for. Quicktime, anyone? I'd sure love it is Apple would release Quicktime for Linux. Microsoft has a stronger record of cross-platform compatible products that some. They have to, by law. There are bigger and better things for them to crush (Java lawsuits with Sun being a good example), which is why they do paradoxical things like hand Apple a barrel of cash to stay afloat.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
I hate to think what Microsoft acquiring Macromedia would mean for webstandards. Dreamweaver by Macromedia is certainly one of the most popular WYSIWYG HTML editors around, and because of that there has been groups such as the WaSP have been work with Macromedia making sure it is complies with the web standards out there. Who knows what Microsoft would do with Dreamweaver seeing that is in direct competition with Frontpage.
aus.music.scrapbook
Wrong, there is one way to use flash as one hell of a software.
In cold times you could use it to burn processors at maximum and keep computer warm.
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
"Flash is a powerful and rich development environment, which - through Macromedia's changes this year - took a step closer to J2EE."
Huh? Excuse me? Flash is anywhere *near* J2EE? Last I looked, Flash is entirely orthogonol to J2EE. It is just a media/presentation layer. That's like saying HTML or SMIL just took a step closer to J2EE. Nonsense.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I wonder if (this report is in fact true) this will add fuel to the WV and MA appeal to the settlement? Can those states use post-judgement behavior to show that the settlement is ineffective and that M$ is not changing its Monopolistic ways?
"Being Irish, he possessed an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through brief episodes of joy." -W. B.
. . . Microsoft plans to aquire the DOJ.
Modular Redundancy--Because 4 out of 5 Nodes agree
However, Mozilla has much better (potentially in some future) vector presentation technology: SVG. It's better integrated to HTML/Javascript code around it. And it's really platform independent.
I think that the day Microsoft buys Macromedia, Flash will dye for Mozilla and many Mozilla developers will switch to SVG. Which is much better than Flash.
Less is more !
Thank god anything to get rid of those annoying flash intros on EVERY WEBSITE ugh!
Does that mean they've fixed the sound-related bug that makes the latest versions of the players essentially useless on Linux?
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
The positive gain? MS Frontpage might just go away. Even if Frontpage wasn't replaced by Dreamweaver, I'm sure that the Dreamweaver influence would be good for Frontpage.
Keeping
There is a reason that I don't have flash installed on any machine that I frequently use. 98% of the sites that use flash use it for ads. Not installing flash is one of the best ways to avoid the most annoying ads.
Kent
Mozilla won't die this easy.
Besides, what stops mozilla from still supporting flash when it's woned by MS ?
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I know from a friend in Apple that the deal was reached because of some out of court settlements. MS doesn't give charity to the competition.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
Well said, well said!
The monopolies watchers are asleep at the switch. Hadn't you noticed ... ?
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
Take a look at this. MS is trying to buy web programmers that understand XML/SGML/HTML so Ballmer can brainwash them. He will do the monkey dance until they fall into submission.
I can't stand animated crap when I'm browsing the web.
If you delete libnullplugin.so then you no longer
get those windows asking you to install plugin xyz
either. The only thing that sucks is for stupid
sites that have splash pages that are flash and
no clear "skip flash intro" link so you can't actually
see any of the *CONTENT* of the site.
Despite the utter rubish some of the typical no-clue-on-design anti-flash zealots on /. kept crapping out in recent years, flash had a clear and distinct position in WWW content.
Until less then a year ago there was no way you could get CSS working the way it was intended on spec-release about 7 years ago. Flash was the *only* way to get a consistent visual apperance across Browsers with solid fonts and stuff that went beyond table-slicing (tables not being intended for pushing pics around anyway).
Flash was *the* tool to actually achieve what CSS promised for so long. With nearly every browser finally fully CSS 2 compliant, this is now a non-issue and put's flash in the extra gadget area so many slashdotters allways suspected it in. With SVG - a format that's substancially easyer to handle in the dynamic content serving dept. - and open architecture web 3D poppingup left right and center and the mighty Java Media Framework finally out, asskick competition for flash is closing in.
Considering this and the fact that the Uber-Web Tool Dreamweaver had it's days when it's templates where the next best thing to the then expensive and unwieldy dynamic content servers this is might actually be the wrong time for M$ to purchase Macromedia. Macromedia never got the curve to professional level tools, Dreamweaver aside. Flash MX coding is as crappy as ever, Director 8.5 still tops the hitlist as the most bizare software joke under the sun, PHP kicks Cold Fusion up and down the street and no f*ckin' way is Kava or JRun gonna stand against Suns free libs and the ever-growing Netbeans popularity combined with the bazillion and one Java/Apache OSS projects.
Bottom Line: I kinda hope that M$ buys Macromedia and drives it against the wall at full speed. Hideously bloated with ColdFusion-ASP-MX.NET intergration or whatever they think might be a cool name for a dead-end product strategy.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
By owning Macromedia they could kill Cold Fusion too, no?
The revolution will NOT be televised.
"sites", not "sights".
Evan Prodromou | evan@prodromou.name | http://evan.prodromou.name/
But i agree, i have no need for flash..
Nooooo! Not my linux flash plugin!
Wherever you go, there you are!
On another note, aren't all M&A's anticompetetive to some extent? Either you're buying a competitor, or you're buying something to keep it from your competitors. There is another possibility - you're failing and need to pick up a viable product to stay in business - it's not anticompetetive, but it doesn't add any value either.
Hypothesis: No merger or acquisition is in the public interest. I do see some positive points, but it's hard to weigh them against the bad.
Paul
If Microsoft acquires Flash and Dreamweaver, it will substantially increase its influence in the web authoring market. Given the antitrust troubles Microsoft's been in, and the fed's recent aversion to approving deals that might create antitrust headaches that Microsoft (if it were sane) wouldn't want to deal with.
> Would adobe finally make photoshop cross platform, invest more in making their own SVG Editor (flash level) & viewer if that would happen?
Last time I checked it is. IIRC Adobe makes their products for Mac OS and Windows, that would make it cross-platform. I wouldn't hold my breath for a Linux port.
Coldfusion is great for rapid prototyping, however, from the system administration side (ie, production support), it crashes just a little too often for my tastes. Yes, many times, it'll bring itself back up, so there will just be a 2-3 minute service interuption...
Now take into consideration that this is happening NIGHTLY. And it doesn't always come back up on its own. Due to the poor model that we have (ie, no one watches the systems save for 7am-7pm weekdays), this has resulted in multi-day outages on the weekends. Luckily, I'm not the one getting the 2am phone calls anymore, but when I hear that they want to put more and more things over on Coldfusion, I'd prefer it they had a stable system first.
Oh -- and I don't like their security model...I heard it's not so server-centric in MX, but well, before that, if someone with access to one directory knew the datasource name used by someone else on that system, they could muck with someone else's data. I'd prefer to see some sort of chrooting for the CFFILE commands, and access restrictions by directory, not for the system as a whole.
[And a daemon that doesn't keep crashing... but well, I'm off on another project, so someone else has had to be the one talking to Macromedia support on a regular basis.]
Supposedly, ColdFusion doesn't have these problems under windows [we're using Solaris], but then I've got to deal with Windows crashing, too.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
And those flash advertisements are why I uninstalled Flash. When you need a 1Ghz or better computer just to go to Yahoo's phone book due to the flash ads that kill your CPU if you run anything less, there's a big problem.
Macromedia and Microsoft would make a good match. They both publish insecure software.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
That's part of the problem with monopolies; they're no longer subject to market pressure, as they ARE teh market. So the law is the last resort.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
I'd have to agree to you. :-)
We have been developing in ASP, PHP, JSP and ColdFusion now, and to be honest, ColdFusion gave us the most problems. Second in place was JSP, for the interested people
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I already can't browse those sites. I won't run flash because it's proven to be insecure. And y'know what? The most significant site I had trouble with was http://www.dubyadubyadubya.com.
Do you call that a "very significant portion of the web."? I don't.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Macromedia got large amounts of press coverage for its recent Studio MX release and most of it is written to suggest that junior HTML has up till now done a fine job for kickstarting the web into existence, but now it's time to let a real man take over the boy's job!
Not that I am entirely anti-Macromedia, don't know much about the rest of the Studio products but Dreamweaver MX is great in actual use. I just want the web to remain based upon HTML as an open standard.
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
It's kind of funny. I met a guy on the train from the airport yesterday who worked on the MX dev team. Really nice guy. We talked about the extension architecture that MX has which makes things like native php support available for it. Also talked about running under Wine, which he said he had played around with a bit.
All in all a tame conversation, mostly technically oriented. Wish I had known about this sooner, I might have brought it up.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
If this does turn out to be more than the regular rumour-mongering, it's worth remembering that even if a merger isn't blocked by US authorities, the European Union Competition Commission has shown itself more than willing to block deals like this that are so obviously anti-competitive. And yes, they do have jurisidiction over the deal, because both companies do business and have subsidiaries in Europe.
Interesting that web designers that get paid to produce large numbers of clean, cross-platform, HTML-standard pages use Dreamweaver then. How interesting indeed, if Dreamweaver produces "crap html code" that the normal output of a Dreamweaver MX coding session can pass the HTML 4.01 strict tests with nary a blink.
Perhaps you just enjoy the masochism inherent in hand-coding.
Illegitimi non carborundum
The reason that I stopped work on this when I did was because I ran into a dilema that I haven't thought of a good solution to. The problem is, there are many different types of sites that use flash:
- Sites that use it only as a decoration but assume that you must have it (hence the the download prompt you describe).
- Sites that use it only as a decoration and recognize this fact, gracefuly degrading when you view their page without flash.
- Sites that "require" flash and won't let you in unless you have it regardless of how necessary it actually is.
- Sites that have separate HTML and Flash versions where you are redirected to the appropriate section based upon whether you have Flash installed.
A plugin that masquerades as Flash would be great for all cases but the last one. I don't want to be automatically shuffled off to the Flash-only site when there is a nice HTML alternative that would work much better for me. Unfortunately, these sites are the ones where the webmasters use Flash responsibly, since they have alternatives available, so I don't really want to penalize them by breaking their site when it should work.I think the solution might be to modify the nullplugin that comes with Mozilla. This is the default plugin, and I believe this is the piece of code responsible for the "do you want to download" messages. When it asks you if you want to download a plugin of a certain type, it should have a checkbox that says "don't ask me again" and then it should remember that mime type (come to think of it, I'd be happy if it never prompted me for any mime types, so maybe I should just disable the prompt globally). It would be nice if it also picked the URLs out of the file on the web page so that you could bypass annoying intros as well.
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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
It'd be a good move for MS. Their game is on a client side -- be it desktop, game console or cell phone. This is the market they want. To reduce development and maintenance cost they need common programming environment (.NET) and UI libraries. Vector graphics provided by Macromedia are ideal -- attractive, small in file size and accepted by users and developers.
It's a bit scary though....
Fireworks is, by far, the predominant web-designer tool for making small cross-platform compatible animations (rollovers, animated GIFs, etc).
Dreamweaver is preferred by all but the most masochistic of web-designers for making clean HTML-compatible code and for linking to a variety of database back-ends or scripting languages (support for PHP, CFM, etc).
Picture, if you will, the usual MS code-bloat and flash-over-usability on those programs. Gone will be the simple blank-page on startup, replaced with an annoying Wizard you can't get rid of for love or money. Gone will be cross-platform compatibility, in favor of Windows-only nonsense. And, the help agents! I don't think I could stand Dreamweaver MX-XP 2004 with some dumb paperclip or puppy telling me how to code an SQL connection.
Illegitimi non carborundum
We've had major problems with the latest version of Dreamweaver making a mess of our HTML.
So if Microsoft buys Macromedia, what will happen to the sharply named "Clean Up Word HTML" command in Dreamweaver? Would it change to...
"Remove Word HTML Enhancements"
"Downgrade From Word HTML"
"Reduce This Page's Functionality"
are a few that come to mind...although if I had it my way, it'd say
"You have Dreamweaver; what the hell are you doing making webpages in Microsoft Word??? Shame on you!!!"
$8.95/mo web hosting
Why should Slashdot care about this news? Every time someone posts a site to Slashdot that uses Flash everyone just goes on about how it doesn't work with Lynx, wget, vi or emacs and it should be posted again when it uses "standard" HTML ...
[under breath]
Lord, I know I shouldn't troll, but did you read this? Man...
The only good I could see coming from this would be if MS trashed Frontpage and just used Dreamweaver.
I develop CDROMS for clients in flash.
I don't do any browser based flash work.
Forget the browser aspect, it works well as a multi-media tool.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
In a recent press brief by Microsoft Inc. it was announced that Microsoft Inc. had acquired the world.
A penguin was quoted as saying
"Bwaqa Bwarrrffff Bawark Guarfff Blark"
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The main "feature" of Flash is that people have decided they don't need content if they've got Flash on their site!
...if it happens, I guess I can write-off the possibility of Fontographer 5.0, which the team at Macromedia has been promising since 1997.
Honestly, it would be in Apple's best interests to snatch up Macromedia before Microsoft can. Apple is primarily a media creation platform, and if Microsoft holds the keys to the kingdom, then Jobs and Co. are fucked.
blog |
This pretty much sums up why enterprise osftware is so bad.
The J2EE community sorely lacks a programming environment that can make Java more accessible to mainstream developers. San Jose, California-based BEA Systems Inc has come close with WebLogic Workshop but this is more for Java-based web services.
Make J2EE programming "more accessible" to main stream developers? Exactly how does a user interface technology make enterprise application development more accessible to "mainstream" developers. If Java were better integrated with Flash, would developers suddly have an easy time churning out competently designed persistent objects and messaging services? Enterprise application development is complicated; deal. If you can't figure out how to write a J2EE from the wealth of resources available, the documentation and specifications, and the free or low cost development tools available (JBoss, Enhydra, Tomcat, etc...), perhaps you have no business building large enterprise applications, since understand JMS/JMX/EJB'S/JNDI/Servlets/JSP's etc. is just the tiniest part of what you should know.
Lucky me, it comes pre-installed in Mozilla and IE. Other than that, great point!
You said galeon, so you must be on Linux. Just rename /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so and /usr/lib/netscape/plugins/libflashplayer.so (this is a red hat 8 system, your files may be elsewhere but will probably have the same name). Keep them around, in case you need them later, but give them some nonsense extension (like .backup).
I just threw together a quick perl script called "toggleflash" that turns flash on or off. It is left off nearly all the time, and makes the whole web experience far nicer. I only leave it in case some idiot web site depends on it for navigation and I HAVE to use their services.
Mathematically impossible requirements are technically not against policy.
Last week they were going to buy Rational and Borland. This week they're going to buy Macromedia. Maybe next week they will buy IBM and Adobe. If people spent half as much effort fighting the things microsoft actually does as what they say they will do, we would all be a little better off. Microsoft acquisitions are actually pretty rare -- they can usually get you to do what they want without buying you so why sould they.
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
Last time I checked there was a lot more to Macromedia than Flash. Most notably are ColdFusion, and Dreamweaver. Fireworks and Freehand aren't all that great, but they have their niche. The question is does your hate for flash equal or exceed what it will mean if Microsoft really does acquire Macromedia?
I think the solution to the anti-trust case should have been that Microsoft is only allowed to expand into new markets, or buy new companies, using profits from its non-monopoly businesses.
Since all divisions of Microsoft lose money except for the monopoly divisions of Office and Windows, Microsoft would have no money to invest in other companies or to extend into new markets.
Just a thought.
In fact, here's my blockfile.
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
There is a need for vector graphics on the web, but it is being filled by SVG. SVG is more standards-based, easier to generate, integrates better with the rest of the browser, and is easier to build tools for. And, hopefully, one can disable the "dynamic" bits of SVG.
>Has anyone ever done anything useful with flash?
>I'd hate to think I'm missing something.
Yes, this site is useful.
Highly offensive, but useful.
While we're all busy bashing MS and Flash, perhaps we shouldn't forget that Webdesigners, the professional ones nearly all use Dreamweaver and/or Flash. Golive doesn't come close to being an industry standard tool although it has improved greatly in version 6. The reason those people use Dreamweaver is because it makes webpage creation faster, not specifically easier. It also has pretty good intergation with the above mentioned server side languages.
What this will mean for DW and Flash is that MS will slowly, in one or two versions, phase out PHP and JSP intergration (they'll claim that the "customers" don't want it) and they'll add MSSQL, IIS, Frontpage and Office integration, by default, thereby making most webpages not work in other browsers or on other server platforms. They'll start adding "extras" into Flash (.NET automatic webservices and scan-your-drive-for-pirated-music stuff for free). They'll probably make a crippled version of the Flash plugin for the Mac in order to avoid the anti-trust complaints and kill the Linux one. They will almost certainly kill off the Mac versions of the MX suite ("because the sales there are so small" they'll say).
However, this will probably backfire nicely in MS's face. Coldfusion, in spite of it's ease (I've used it and it is easy), has become a major deadweight in the company, due to the advances in PHP. There is no real reason today to go for ColdFusion, given that it is expensive and the tags are proprietry. Flash already has a pretty good competitor for animated vector stuff with Livemotion2.0 from Adobe and *new* Flash only sites have all but died out because the ergonomics of the web dictate that you have to design for compatibility and therefore almost every Flash site has to have a HTML version accompanying it and that pushes up development costs and companies don't have money today for luxuries as they did in the dotcom days. This generally restricts Flash to be used as a tool for making animations.
Adobe could counter a buy out like this quite nicely in that they release their own version of the Flash plugin, thereby becoming the "standard" in web graphics that they have been running after for so long. In the resulting confusion and chaos in Webplugins, which "standard" do you think would win? MS tried this with DHTML, and even though they 95% of the browser market they don't have a monopoly on authoring, as almost all sites code for standards these days.
Mainly this would lose Adobe another competitor, because MS would certainly botch any attempt to gain designers with an MS version of Freehand. just as they have botched almost every attempt to make a competitor to Photoshop.
When I read the headline the first thing that I thought of was the story, "Nintendo Playstation Settlement Bombshell". This looks just slightly more credible.
Slashdot: Gossip for Nerds, Shit that Matters to Taco and Hemos.
Honestly, this is probably not even an issue for a company like Microsoft, but whenever acquisitions like this get mentioned I start wondering.
Part of the whole Enron mess was that their growth was mainly due to acquisitions and mergers, not real internal growth. With problems like declining PC sales, are software/hardware companies going to have to resort to similar measures to boost their stock value?
As a Macromedia developer I have to say that it would come as no surprise if this story turns out to be true. Perhaps it would explain the friendly reception of Microsoft .NET people at Macromedia Devcon this year sporting their .NET t-shirts at a conference of what I thought was a direct competitor to Cold Fusion.
.NET by integrating the benefits of each suite but it could also help bolster IE over true contenders Mozilla. Imagine providing intergration and greater (perhaps only perceived) compatibility with Flash, Dreamweaver and Cold Fusion? Cold Fusion MX now allows for direct integration of JSPs and from my understanding the CFMX code is actually compiled into Java code. This seems like Microsoft's backdoor to the Java community. Being able to create web apps with all the benefits of Java with the simplicity of the Cold Fusion Markup Language sounds like a perfect product for them, all while being defacto-compatible with the huge number of *nix servers out there. So while on the surface it may seem like it's just a Flash/IE thing I think the story is much deeper.
I can see why it would sense to both Microsoft and Macromedia. Not only would it spark a revival for
Whether or not this will be a step up for easy development and delivery of web apps will remain to be seen. There seems potential for great things but an equal potential for some huge mistakes.
// The fastest Alt-Tab in the West
I was always kinda amused that they got away with the blatant rip-off of the RCA "listening to his master's voice" dog logo for SoundEdit. I still have SE16 kicking around on some zip somewhere, haven't used it in years.
RE: MS buying up Macromedia would REALLY SUCK. I have always liked Macromedia products, especially compared to Adobe and OTHER software companies. I even *gasp* like Flash (Homestarrunner, people? HELLO?!?) and am sick of all the whining geeks do about Flash intros, as if that was the worst abuse of Web technology out there. Losing Flash to The Dark Side(TM) would be a real step backward for everyone.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
Hopefully it would mean FLASH is DEAD instead...I do so hate waiting for those things to load.
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
Macromedia Dreamweaver and maybe fireworks are the only two things that I wish were portable to Linux, then I'd take this W!ndows 2000 pack it up and sell it on ebay and go nothing but penquin. I'm just not happy with any web design tools (WYSIWYG) on linux. GIMP gets the job done, but I like the way fireworks gets it done. I could switch most everyting else if I could get dreamweaver on Linux... and that most definatly WON'T happen if it becomes Microsoft Dreamweaver... BLEGH!!!!!
Flash could be a vehicle in Microsofts' attempt to dominate the mobile world. With Flash they instantly have access to a large developer community that can make games for MS Phone shit.
This way, I can stop struggling with getting flash to work every time I upgrade my broswer. Now, it will never work.
There's always CodeWeavers X-Over plugIn. But I'm not a big fan of Flash sites anyway as most don't really accomplish anything and are very poorly implemented.
-- DuckWing
Not only would M$ happily make Flash an "IE only" component, they would also ensure that Linux never gets a Shockwave browser plugin too! (Why is there no Shockwave plugin!?)
And then they would wreck Dreamweaver, probably removing it's JSP support, and then what?
I really hope Macromedia tells them to go pound sand.
Macromedia also has Dreamweaver and Director, but perhaps you forgot these:
.NET, but is oriented toward code, unlike Notepad and Wordpad.
* Fireworks and Freehand -- software for creating graphics. Maybe MS wants to take on Adobe (Photoshop, Illustrator)?
* Contribute -- a content-management system that lets you publish to the web without knowing HTML. As someone who has worked on many clients' websites, I can tell you this is going to be *big*.
and, since the Macromedia bought Allaire, they could get these too:
* ColdFusion -- a widely-used, tag-based web application server and language (and the easiest to learn, at that). Unlike ASP, it comes with things like administrating through a web interface, sending email, uploading files, verity searches, etc.
* JRun -- a popular J2EE Server.
* Homesite -- a great text editor that isn't as bulky as VS
Joe
http://www.joegrossberg.com
Borland, Rational, Macromedia, they might not get them all, but they sure want something under the tree for Bill.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Maybe you should try the Flash 6 Linux player. It was released a week or so ago and fixes all of the bugs that have been filed in the Mozilla bug database against the Flash5 Linux player.
@de_machina
>I want someone to write a dummy flash plug in that
>does absolutely nothing...
Remove libnullplugin (if you're using mozilla, of course)
Hey! That's my sig you're smoking there!
ColdFusion is much easier to learn for beginner and non-programming types like myself. I cranked out some decent web apps in a relatively short amount of time. The same apps would have taken much longer with ASP and would have been impossible for ME to do with JSP (due to a lack of understanding of the langauge). Even PHP would've taken a good bit longer, although I think it's the next quickest server-side language to develop.
Without CFML, I think a lot of beginners and non-programmers will be left in the dark. I used it to get my foot in the door to the world of web app programming, and I think it's a great way to get data-driven web content out the door. It's not perfect for high-level enterprise use, but its ease of use makes up for most of its shortcomings.
Transistors and Beer!!
And its not just flash, there is another Macromedia product that I'm far more worried about Microsoft getting their hands on: Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver has quickly become the standard HTML editor. Can you imagine what's going to happen if it starts making code like Frontpage does now?
.NET !
.NET would help, but Dreamweaver, if they could get their hands on it, would be a major coup for Microsoft...
My bet is that Bill and Friends have their eyes on Dreamweaver more than Macromedia.
Don't know about the US press, but the reviews I've read over here in the UK regarding UltraDev (and subquently of Dreamweaver MX) are of the opinion that they are the tool for web development, and leave FrontPage in the dust.
In fact, one commentator over here, John Honeyball, writing in PC Pro, went as far as to say that Macromedia, with their MX products, put Microsoft's Visual Studio.NET to shame when it came to doing web development with IIS/ASP and
Of course, being in a position to 'persaude' ColdFusion shops to move to
-MT.
Uh, look a t Microsoft's history. The flash format will live about 1 minute after they buy it, after which it will be killed in favor of whatever equivalent MS is developing, which will be about the same, but won'y play on anything but windowze and Mac.
Does this increase or decrease the possibility that Homesite will be made available for Macs?
I don't think it looks good either way.
Look at it this way:
Frontpage(dead) replace with Dreamweaver
Liquid(dead) replace with Flash
Adobe is a strong company now but MS already has come out with a rolled in MS version of PDF. If they market Macromedia's graphical tools well they should be able to buy adobe in a couple more years.
I think this is pretty bad news for Cold Fusion programmers. I bet the $25k I spent on Cold Fusion Linux servers won't have any more upgrades.
I suppose hoping for any sort of anti-trust to block this is beyond hope?
Didn't you know that you can have Quicktime in Linux? ... MPlayer
Sure, it will play Radius Cinepak video and older Sorenson video natively, but last time I checked, it needed the Windows QuickTime DLLs to play the newer version of Sorenson video used by default in QuickTime 5 and 6 or to play QDesign audio. However, Windows QuickTime DLLs work only on x86 architecture, and the user needs a copy of Microsoft Windows ($150 for OEM single copy) to extract them from the installer.
Will I retire or break 10K?
As only one person in this whole thread seems to have noted, this isn't about Flash plugins or Cold Fusion MX. It's about cutting off Apple's air supply. Just as Apple has been buying up a few pro video and music tool companies and discontinuing the Windows versions, this would be a means for discontinuing Mac versions of some of the killer apps that are run heavily on Macs. If you can't get Flash and Dreamweaver (and to a lesser extent, Fireworks, Director, Freehand and Fontographer) for the Mac, the Mac suddenly loses at least a third of its pro user base. Lose the web designers, and you also lose the people and companies that use Macs for that and other purposes. Once they have to move web people to PCs, they'll move the Photoshop/Illustrator people to PCs, too. Then the Quark people. Poof. Within two years, the only professional uses for Macs will be video production and some music.
Game over.
Supposing first that this rumored acquisition is true, it won't be political ties that permit it. Microsoft has given generously to both parties, almost equally.
No. If this deal is allowed, it will be because it wouldn't give Microsoft a monopoly, as Adobe still exists. With the Intuit case, MS Money and Quicken were two products that had a combined lock on 98% of the personal finance products on the market. While Flash is almost pervasive, Adobe exists with SVG and competitors to almost every other product that Macromedia offers.
-- Len
Same here. I hate sites that require it. If the site requires it, then I never visit the site again.
Mozilla certainly will not die if this happens.....
er...
The only reason Microsoft ever got a foothold in the proprietary software industry is that the company published (not developed, published) the operating system that came packed in with a personal computer sold by what was at the time the best-known computer company.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I wish I could disable Flash without uninstalling it. Based on my experience, with out it, IE at least prompts for the plugin each time a page requires it. I would like to have it there when I want to use it. I haven't really look very far for a hack, so share if you know of one!
Even if this is possible with Mozilla and I am sure it is, I use IE.
-Slashdot Junky
.
Landfill Mining Co.
Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
FLASH, is probably one of the best 10 web technologies out there.
Problem, is most people don't KNOW what FLASH is.
You all are downing FLASH, but that's because all you understand about FLASH is that it's an vector animation and presentation tool.
It is now, much, much more. It is now a dynamic data conveyance tool. It is a graphical object model that can potentially rival and replace HTML.
I could understand such comments when FLASH was naught but a simple "ooh/ahh animation" and "this is taking too bloody long to download".
But it's now advanced a far beyond that point. And is advancing further. I've observed examples of Flash tied to ColdFusion and SQL apps in which schedule changes were made simply by dragging and dropping the event on a different location. NO page refresh. The FLASH app went out contacted a ColdFusion component, passed relevant arguments, processed said actions, requested information, received it and displayed the updated information to the user.
All the user saw was himself clicking the event, dragging it to another day, and releasing it. Now that, is potential power potent enough to alter the web.
Yes, good utilization of FLASH is "rare". But if you see an application that uses FLASH to it's full extent, it will blow your mind. It blew me away. My jaw dropped.
In fact, a lot of people see the potential for FLASH to replace HTML on J2EE applications as the interface of choice. Further added improvement being the scalability of a vector based interface which can scale from desktop, to Palm unit, to billboard.
...is thousand of Mac-based web designers saying "Oh shit."
OK, I gotta give some credit for that one.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
This is the one thing that scares me the most. I love Dreamweaver, MS will most likely ruin it by adding their own "stuff". DWUD works fine with MS stuff as it is now, but that wouldn't be good enough for MS, they would, as usual, complicate things and bloat it so that the lowest level of user could use it...:X
Look for Flash to become the new PowerPoint.
Just imagine the horrible, ugly, stupid and brainless presentations cranked out by the thousands and millions with the new, easy-to-use MS FlashOffice. I can see the clip art now...
RTFM; please, I beg you.
NOTE: Flash is not just for browsers. Flash is actually a darn good alternative to VisualBasic but it has a lot more capability. We use a licensed version of Flash for GUI development to our C++ framework. Flash offers us a ready made IDE to offer our customers.
Note also, that Flash is being used in a lot more embedded devices (cell phones, PDAs, etc). This would be a crippling blow to a great product.
BTW, Flash libraries for Linux are anemic -- granted. But this is the normal case for almost every technology that is Windoze focused.
MS has heard the rumors of the upcoming versions of Flash that add a lot more programmability to the platform. I would suspect this is a move to kill the competition to VB, C## and the rest of MS products.
BTW, I cannot believe all the whining in the replies over how Linux browsers do not support Flash and people are sick of Flash based web sites. Get with it! Not everything needs to be plain text with GIF images. This is very good x-platform technology and the Linux community should embrace it and not slam it. With SWF open sourced - that places MM in a very select crowd of major MS platform players.
Moot
I was wondering how we can be prepared for this, interestingly I stumbled over an SVG Vector drawing program named sodipodi a while ago:
:-) . This article explains it a bit more:
Sodipodi
Sodipodi screenshots on Linux with GTK Geramik theme
It is a nice open source vector drawing program. And it got me interested in looking into the SVG format, which also supports (web) animation
SWF Is Not Flash (and Other Vectored Thoughts)
Anyway I think SVG will have a bright future and even can replace Flash (SWF) in certain extent, more info on SVG can be found at W3C.org here:
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.0 Specification
Mozilla SVG Project
The good companies whose stock got dragged down with the dot.com trash are now perhaps undervalued and a good deal.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Unlike some other posts I've read, many web developers do NOT use Dreamweaver because they can't stand "visual" development. I'm perfectly capable of writing my own code thankyouverymuch. However, it is much to Macromedia's credit that they own the best tools around...for both visual and textual web development. They were smart to buy Allaire.
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
I don't know what you've been smoking, but 70% more is quite a stretch.
Since you obviously didn't follow his link, I'll fill in the blank for you.
Since 1990, 43% of Microsoft-related donations went to the Democrats, and 57% went to the republicans. The 2000 cycle, which is when Bush was elected had the split 46% Dems. and 53% Reps.
Since your figure is "70% more money" is a comparison of the larger to the smaller amount, the actual figure is 34%. This is distorted by the relatively recent interest that Microsoft developed in politics.
Anyway, this site is "News for Nerds", so if simple multiplication and division are too tough for you, you should hang out somewhere else where you can put your Liberal Arts degree to better use.
-- Len
We've had issues with Cold Fusion but nothing like that. Course we run it almost entirely on Windows machines. There's another group in the company who run it on Solaris/iPlanet boxes, but I don't know what their success with it has been. Also, depends on the version...4.5, 5.0, MX? We're mostly 4.5, some 5.0, and just have one or two production sites on MX. My experiences with MX is it requires a much beefier box, and don't rely on the built-in mailserver for sending mail. Instead, I install IIS's SMTP service, then have CF send to that and let IIS relay the mail to our main mailservers. Of course YMMV. For us, I'd say the after the initial adjustment period for getting used to CF MX, it's been very stable.
The ColdFusion web application server is regarded as superior to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASPs) and even Santa Clara, California-based Sun's Java Server Pages (JSPs) because of its simplicity, power and completeness. ColdFusion MX, meanwhile, uses ColdFusion Mark-up Language (CFML) tags that compile to Java.
Good one guys, you had me till I got to this part!
But I think we all know cold fusion has worse syntax then html itself. Anyone who defends cold fusion hasn't made any mid level applications with it or only used it to launch servlets or COM components (getting as much code as possible out of cold fusion).
use flash for fancy and slow site navigation
Slow? SWF can be much smaller than a PNG image in some cases because while PNG is a raster format (essentially gzipped .bmp), SWF is a vector format. Sure, there's SVG, but more people have SWF viewers than SVG viewers, and silent SWF doesn't seem to have significant patent problems.
use flash for displaying beautiful unreadable anti-aliased text
Actually, it's unreadable not because it's anti-aliased but because 1. it's anti-aliased without moving the control points to pixel boundaries (either automatically or via hints in the font), because 2. it's often displayed on top of a busy background, but most importantly because 3. the text is too dang SMALL. Most web pages that specify a text style specify glyphs somewhere between 12 and 16 pixels tall; designers who care little about usability often size SWF text that's a paragraph or longer at about 9 pixels or so.
other than those downsides flash can be used for good and not evil
WE DRINK RITALIN!
but only in moderation
Interesting.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Maybe, maybe not, but all the headhunter/HR buzzword flacks seem to want 2 years experience and a completed project in it. (Waste of time explaining to them that it's only been out of beta for a year.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
If anything, Mozilla would improve -- since Flash wouldn't work in Mozilla anymore, the developers might come to their senses and re-write it to igore Flash altogether. I mean, really, how many times do I have to say "NO!" when it asks if I want to load the plug-in before Mozilla/Phoenix/whatever realize that I don't want it and stop asking? And when are they going to block downloads from Flash servers the way they let us block downloads from ad servers?
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
People seem fixated on Flash. Macromedia has some other major products, including Freehand, an extremely powerful and useful graphic/layout app that, like most (all?) Macromedia apps runs well on Mac or Windows. If MS gets this it would be the start of it taking over DTP -- a field where MS products (Publisher, Word) are held in derision. Macromedia also has a somewhat dormant font editor, Fontographer. Adobe could be the next in the crosshairs.
I have a friend who works at Microsoft Business Solutions and he first told me about this move over year ago. Nothing confirmed just gossip around the office. So if this is true, they've been looking in Macromedia's direction for a long time.
wow... this is scary. I hope microsoft doesn't buy macromedia and then drop, or lower the quality of, support for Mac users within a few years. The day that microsoft forces me to use Windows for multimedia development I'm going to go nuts.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
I can but laugh. Oy.
First of all I'm just tired of the tyraid that is always against flash, it just gets old... .. Tired of waiting for the flash pages to load? Sure, they *can* be a pain at times, but that is no where near flash's fault, it's the actual developer, .the part of the equation that always seems to be dropped out. What about two-three years ago when all you seen was gifs blinking everywhere? It's still out there, though not nearly as bad, it's still a problem. Splash screens can be a pain as well, this I'll admit,.. but I couldn't begin to tell you the many many sites I've seen that a non flash page carries over 150k in weight, or the pages that developers don't optimize thier images as they should. Back again to the web developer. I'm all for standards, I'm a acting member of WaSP, and I don't think that flash is the replacement of html, well xhtml/xml. But I think it's a very viable enhancement, there are search engines now that can parse through flash for indexing, the swf format is open, So, the comment about the ide sucks, or about how there isn't one for linux, . why whine? Build one. Why not complain about how long streaming media takes?, .. and though its not perfect but the S. codec in flash 6 is by far faster than any of the other big boys in the streaming media front. And the actionscript is based of the ECMA standard, . so I can't see any complaints there. And now that web services, remoting, and database driven flash applications are possible it allows for a better ease of coding, . IF the webdevelopers try and utilize them. There was a comment about having to code for two platforms, flash and non flash, with db driven, it's not a worry, . build the guis, and let the db do the talking.
.. as ms struts around we'll see a ms world,. and the hell that may come with it.
Lets break it down and see what you're really griping at,
You *can* have your back button back, hot keys enabled, searchable text, and there are a couple of screen readers that can read through flash, so it's all back to the developer, and not the product itself.
And I know php, and cold fusion, tell me something I CAN'T do with cold fusion that I can do with php? in the web scripting world I don't see it. To some it's ugly, and thats fine, tag based languages can only appeal a certain amount of people,. considering that xml is tag based, I can't see it as a viable arguement, but to no end I'm sure there will be several here. The database seperation layer?, where was that first? Can php run ontop of a j2ee platform? just curious, I couldn't find anything but enhydra, . and I'm not going to touch that. but I'll assume it can, . and cold fusion is right there can run anywhere as well. In the open source forum I'm sure it won't be appreciated as my comments are thrown, and thats fine, . but all in all I STILL say it's back to the developers who code and what they CHOOSE to code with,
anyways....
I would have to think that this is mostly about Flash. Flash MX is a pretty amazing product now that it includes Flash Remoting.
.Net and J2EE.
.Net (and exclusion of Java) whould be a big win for .Net. Clearly Microsoft wants this for it's own, and wants to cut out Java.
Flash Remoting is what Java applets should have been - a thick client techonology that works. Using Flash Remoting it is possible to make calls to serverside software components directly over HTTP. It's quite extrodinary to be able to invoke a method on an a server object from inside a client side script and get back a cached result set from a database. Right now Flash Remoting supporte both
It's obvious that integration of this with
Hopefully the FTC will put the deep six on this - it's an extremely anti-competitive merger.
please click here to install it before proceeding to the courthouse. thank you.
sulli
RTFJ.
In Opera, to disable flash:
1) Hit F12
2) type p
3) Done.
Flash is off (yeah!) and sites will not nag you to the crap.
I recommend that you check out Opera - it has many USEFUL features and was developed by thinking people rather than brain-dead drones. It may not be perfect, but it's miles ahead of the Borg's browser.
Sigs are bad for your health.
Everybody knows that you can get the DLLs anywhere.
On any architecture other than i586, the Windows QuickTime DLLs run way too slow to play a movie in real time.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Perhaps a GPL is to unrestrictive. I'm sure one or two small changes would make it fit into an OpenSource Business Model that Macromedia could Profit from.
Macromedias code could be further held close to its chest by the fact that its likely difficult to compile and not a simple ./configure && make && make install, similar to Cinelerra, and OpenOffice and how its just easier to download the binary. ... good by.
Rant Done
Need help finding the flow? http://www.myspace.com/naturalismandbalance
Fine by me, as long as they don't touch HomeSite+ I'm just fine..
Effluent To Acquire Another Bad Smell?
Sigs are bad for your health.
Businesses that depend on Flash deserve what they get. The rule of thumb has always been and should always remain, use Flash for eye candy but don't require it for the site to function. For example, I definitely turn it off because it's annoying to have space ships flying across my screen advertising Yahoo DSL or scrolling flashing throbbing full page banner ads that would make an epileptic go into a seizure presented to you. Flash is the technological equivalent of hopping up on someone's desk and laying a nice steamy turd on their monitor. It adds color and definitely gets people talking around the water cooler, but nobody really ever wants to see it.
Maybe, but I think they have another weapon that they can use, and have used in the past - the old "embrace and extend".
I think they'll deliberately add new features, distribute a new development environment that always choses the newest way of doing things, thus forcing all new animations/games/etc. to be non-viewable on older kit.
I think that it was ony good for mini-putt games anyway, so I won't really miss it. Apart from mini-putt, that is.
THL.
Keeping
Today:
.NET apps and CF runs only on XP, and ONLY connects to M$ SQL server.
Developers use Dreamweaver to wrie cross platform code taht integrates with ColdFusion (which can be installed on a variety of platfors, and can connect to a variety of DB servers) and can include Flash components which run on almost all browsers, and can get data form a HUGE variety of platform indepenant sources.
Tomorrow:
The Mac versions lag behind the windows versions. The Windows versions get "extended" functionality... but only if CF is running on WinXP, and the DB it connects to is MS SQL Server. You can *still* use other things, but it's a huge pain in the ass.
Next Week:
No more Mac versions. Flash plugin is Active-X only, and can get data only from
I can only hope Macromedia looks beyond quick cash flow and actally gives a shit about the Web. Then again, given the sad state of "profit trumps all other decisions" corporate action the US is going through... *sigh*
PLEASE DON'T SELL YOUR SOUL TO THE DEVIL MACORMEDIA!!!
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
Seriously why is it that so many Slashdotters are reasonable when it comes to the right tool for the job attitude on most things, but because a lot of ads and annoying skip intros are done in Flash, they villify the tool. Fact of the matter is Flash is the right tool for some jobs, and despite all the abuse by "me-to" splash screen creators, there are a lot of things Flash does really well. And do you honestly think that if Flash vanished off the face of the planet tomorrow, there'd suddenly be less ads or ads would be less obnoxious?
I was hoping for some interesting commentary and speculation on the Microsoft buying Macromedia rumors and instead found an anti-Flash flame war. Sorry for the soapbox, but it's just disappointing.
Vote Quimby.
Adobe has pretty much dropped SVG development, and nobody else is picking it up. That train is not going anywhere soon.
I find this humorous because people, so use to products so incomplete and full of bugs that there are constant iterations, visit Adobe's SVG viewer to find that the last update was November of 2001. The problem in their thought process, though, is that that iteration is extremely good and very comprehensive. It may not support the latest version of Mozilla, but on the most popular platform (IE on the Wintel platform) it works absolutely stunningly. During the same time SVG has been added to virtually every vector graphics package as a native or export graphics format.
Recently, within the past two months, the W3C formalized SVG 1.1 and mobile SVG 1.1.
The only reason SVG isn't front and foremost right now is because of the tech downturn at the same time that the technology became mature. It should be noted that during the same time Flash has been marginalized to basically animated advertisements (the only other common use of Flash that I see are misguided intro animations, themselves a bad relic of 1998. The sites that keep out patrons by using Macromedia at the GUI are few and far between, and generally are "Web design firms desperate for business".
DOM is a part of browsers, as is XML, as is ECMAScript/JavaScript. A standard vector graphics package that interacts with these native elements is such an obvious eventual destination that it's screaming out. It wouldn't suprize me at all if the next version of Internet Explorer had native SVG support (perhaps provided by Adobe) which would basically ring the death knell for Flash.
" I don't think that MS is any more innovative than the average goldfish."
You haven't seen my goldfish. He's a fuckin genius!
-Rabbit
Take a look at this article on ZDnet I read recently about Flash MX.
.NET. This review shows it's not quite there yet, but it's certainly a step in this direction.
It seems that in some cases, Flash can be used to build REAL APPLICATIONS like this one here that are:
1) Easy to use.
2) Cross platform (windows, mac, unix, palm, etc)
3) Easy to build
In this regard, this puts pressure on VB and/or
What does MS do whenever it runs into something that outperforms their own products?
Buy the company, of course.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I think the most interesting angle on this speculative buy-out is video. Flash does video now. Flash is undoubtedly installed on more computers than any of the the big 3 video players: QT, Real, MS. (Flash video isn't very useful for users downloading stand-alone movies, but it's an excellent alternative to presenting embedded video - and there's no multiple player issues.)
For context, Mpeg4 is based on QT in some way; MS isn't playing along with the Mpeg4 standard (and seem to have their own proprietary version of Mpeg4 - you can now buy cameras with Mpeg4 stamped on them but the videos can only be played with WMP - nice standard). And the new Real player claims to play anything (Mpeg4, WMP, QT, Real) - except Flash. QT plays Flash (but not Flash video yet).
So Flash would look like a good sized stick for MS to beat QT, Mpeg4, and Real with.
(To say nothing of the database/server angle.)
Hmm, a rumor of a small company being bought by a much larger company, and at the end of the year. ;)
Sound 100% to me...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
right, same for me.
It just crashes all the time and that I certainly won't miss.
I think some of you guys don't really have a clue to the power of flash. There really is alot more that can be done with it than just "splash screens" And to whomever said PHP would kick CFs ass is truly on acid. Both have their strengths and weaknesses but CF is by no means a pile of shit compared to PHP. Considering CFs simple language structure it is incredibly powerful - and provides for extremely fast web development. Something PHP does not do. I like both - but when it comes down to cranking something out that is both fast and powerful CF is nearly always my choice. If I have the time to build - I am still just as likely to go with CF as PHP. Flash allows developers to provide end users with a really nice UI that you still can not achieve using CSS and HTML. Allowing for a far more compact and efficient website. Unfortunatly nobody uses it for that - instead 99% of all flash is a waste as people just try to be artsy with it. I do agree with most of the negative sentiments about Director though - i really don't have any use for it and wouldn't mind it going away anyway. There have been some decent web-based shockwave games in the past though :O) like King Putt (a miniature golf game).
I think it would suck if MS bought Macromedia. Hopefully it doesn't happen. Even if you don't like CF I think you can agree that to have one less competitor to ASP wouldn't be a good thing.
Unless your just so blinded by PHP and opensource love that you want opensource to be the only alternative - kind of like MS wants to be the only one... In my opinion both are equally bad alternatives.
The flash plugin is becoming about as necessary as the Comet Cursor plugin. It's about as useful these days, considering it's amazing capability to render transparent animations all over the boring content on the page. I swear, they will find me one day dead in front of my computer because of an aneurism caused by the extreme frustration and annoyance caused by Flash advertisements. In fact, the "Comment" edit box stops receiving text input every time the f'n flash Speakeasy ad at the top of the page rotates. GOD DAMNN!!! AAAArrrr POP ....
because the world could and should concentrate on the flash-replacement SVG.
You're the only person to notice this because this is not the reality of things.
If Microsoft wanted Apple dead they would've been dead several years ago. Don't you recall when Microsoft invested in Apple to keep ti alive? This was right around when the anti-trust lawsuits began. Basically Microsoft wanted to keep them around so that they (Microsoft) could claim that Apple was indeed a viable competitors and that they (Microsoft) were not a monopoly.
Taking a look at Apple now they are basically dead. They still have some dedicated designers but they're basically losing the educational sector. If anything this is a move against Java.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
Flash is the killer app and half of you wont realise it till its too late.
Sure it can take long to download but how many people in 6 years will have broadband?
How many web applications are used internally where this isn't a problem such as intranets?
How many commercial or decent sites still have large animated gifs. The Animated gifs period in internet history is where flash is at now, but what about the future? How many applications can you write which look the same and act the same on all platforms and even pdas without a change.
Why should the internet not mimic conventional desktop apps that many are used to?
Once flash accesibility is improved and search engines can index flash contentent html is as good as dead.
Look at xml it's really not more than glorified text files which have to be parsed, not very efficient yet people use it today.
In recent articles in java magazines, authors have accepted that flash is what applets and *swing* shoudl have been!
Once people start to use it right and we see some good uses we'll see rapid adoption. The problem is marketing, if more leading sites utilised flash correctly a lot more of people would realise this.
Although this is just a rumour, it scares me to the depths of my being. If I lose the one app I live for (outside of Reason, of course
I could care less about Flash, and although the majority of my former classmates in the Multimedia program at Humber College are deep into it, touting its crappy-ass feature set as the be-all and end-all of interactive site development, I know that any and all of its features were in Director/Shockwave first.
Example: Flash can only handle 2 minutes of video, and it has to be run through the sorenson compressor.
Director, on the other hand, can handle unlimited amounts of video, using quicktime or real, with any compression scheme.
Flash's 3D features? None.. but you can use third-party apps like swift 3d to create/convert 3D from other programs.
Director has an insane amount of control available for 3D, with many behaviours (reusable sets of code) in its built-in library, and powerful scripting control.
Flash's multiuser ability is getting there, but Director has it soundly beat once again, having had the multiuser toolkit for a number of years now.
Plus, Director MX can kick out runtime apps for OS 9, X and win platforms with many options and abilities. Flash can only do so much to begin with, so it falls behind in this department as well.
Now don't get me wrong, the last thing I want is for Microsoft to get their slimy hands on more useful apps, ready to bleed them dry and destroy them until they are a living shell of their former selves.. Any time MS buys a company, an angel dies.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all on Slashdot.
Peace
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. it's the only thing that ever has.
Face it everyone, M$ is here to stay. There are legally untouchable, Windows is the standard for operating systems, and .NET Passports are everywhere (not to mention indelibly added to XP). I wouldn't be shocked at all if they replace social security numbers with them. Of course, with all the standardization, they will eventually be forced to release the source for windows and IE.
Overall, any merger is scary, and I hope it never happens. The guys at Macromedia are really sharp and they make superior software. It's not all bad if it happens though (excluding the fact that Microsoft just became even more unstoppable).
Good: * flash comes installed with windows
* microsoft integrates macromedia into it's software
* possible optimization of flash software
* possible creation of a graphics suite capable of tackling Adobe (not to trash Photoshop or anything, but the birth of anything to rival it would be amazing)
* almost for-sure improvement in the API of flash developers who want to make actual flash applications, could show java and perl the door if they combined it with PHP directly
Bad: * closed source, attempt to trap flash technology in the land of internet explorer
* new, more sophisticated flash ads and banners
* probably, and amazingingly, security issues with flash programs (can you imagine flash virii? - lol)
* the ruination of the clean interface of Dreamweaver and Flash development suites
* the addition of tons of bs into the clean code that dreamweaver cranks out (has anyone here looked at Word HTML? omg, nasty!)
[c0d3fu]: jwjb62@umr.edu || james@macrohub.com
I've never used flash so I may be completely wrong.
If you think about flash as a programming language instead of web animations, it opens a number of possibilities. For example, themes could be written in flash. You could animate all kinds of things in the desktop. Flash could be integrated with VB.
I heard very strictly "off the record" from someone who interned at M$, and via another source who works there about a projects code-named Glimmer and Avalon. Avalon was apparently an attempt to build a rich-client-in-the-browser similar to flashMX, that might replace windows forms in .NET (that sounded pretty un-likely to me, but you never know...). Glimmer was apparently a sub-set of that. The only URL which details any of this is this fluff piece from InfoWeek. If M$ are working on something like this then a possible purchase of Macromedia would be very interesting.....
That and the fact that Flash has 99% market penetration and SVG has 0.01% and no active development.
Complete and absolute BS. Flash has probably 1% penetration in places where dynamic vector graphics could be used. There are countless places where neither Flash or SVG are in use because people either don't want to exclude users for marginal gain. Saying that SVG has "no active development" is absolute Flash-enabled fantasy as well: I don't know if you noticed, but SVG 1.1 was big news. SVG 1.2 will be even bigger news, and there is native support in virtually all graphics packages and a growing developer base. Flash just keeps on in the margins, shunned by the overwhelming majority of those in the know.
DHTML makes for not fully-functional GUIs and excludes NS4, Java crapplets collapsed under browser incompability, and VBish client-server stuff is too hard to deploy.
If one is willing to say "Well Netscape 4 is Flash enabled when you install the Flash plug-in", then I'll turn that around and say "Netscape 4 is Flash enabled when you install IE 6/Mozilla. If one has the option to install Flash, then a newer browser is certainly in the works. One will have probably an equal number of users who don't have Flash installed as those who have a browser ill suited for modern DHTML.
As far as SVG having an "unmaintained plugin" that's just a riot. Have you used the Adobe SVG Viewer? It is tremendous. Corel is actively developing a plugin. There is a version of Mozilla with SVG native support. Perhaps you haven't been paying attention (of have been hiding hoping that the web switches to Flash), but virtually every graphics company but Macromedia is involved and participating in the SVG standard. Take a look at the signators at the bottom of the spec...the only big company missing is Macromedia. Tell me again how Flash is the new world order...
Years ago, when few of you knew of Macromedia...
Microsoft tried to acquire them then and failed, why would now that they are very successful would they accept such an offer? Bah that's ridiculous.
Karma (Microsoft still gets none)
There is evidence to prove both Democrats and Republicans are lying cocksuckers. Vote independently.
. . . that Microsoft bought a piece of software (DOS, Excel, etc, etc).
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
If Microsoft becomes the owner of Macromedia and subsquently, flash - that makes flash evil by association, right? This should help all the anti-flashers in their arguments... Look! here come the trolls.
Well, the thing that pops into my mind is that Flash is getting some embedded systems interface use. In reality this is probably a much smaller consideration in the overall scheme, but think of Moxi digital and their STB UI- its Flash based.
.net is a good option for certain devices but embedded Linux looks awfully juicy next to it. Flash as a solution for developers
Microsoft, I think, is having some trouble in the embedded market. XP embedded is simply too expensive. CE
to create fancy UI's for their embedded devices ensures that Microsoft will have a play in this area no matter who's OS gets used.
We will soon see the end of Flash and the end of Cold Fusion.
"If a show of teeth is not enough, bite
why do you think the desire to have absolute style control comes from?
-pyrrho
I don't get the problem with HTML email... why is this such a problem?
-pyrrho
The idea that a purchase of Macromedia would be to put Apple out of business is absolutely laughable. Such an acquisition could be about any or all of:
Vote Quimby.
There is nothing more agravating than going to a site that looks interesting and having a giant flash splash page slow down my browser (or even crash it!)
PDF is even worse. There may be a few rare occasions where complex diagrams are better rendered in PDF than say GIF but they are few and far between. I hate it when I go to google, do a search, find a relevant document and... arghhh a PDF file opens and slows everything to a crawl. This happens with bus and train schedules. Does anyone remember what the table tag is for?! Even worse sometimes a PDF document will be used for a plain text document without any special fonts etc!!!
In short M$ should buy both Adobe and Macromedia because both of these company's products are perfect bloatware that go well with M$ Office. Maybe then the rest of us can go back to using HTML, XML, GIFs and JPEGs all generated by the likes of GIMP etc.
*** Please visit my homepage for news and info. about trademark law, domain-name disputes and other e-commerce issues
it is a programming language, and a robust one at that -- in fact, i'm hard-pressed to think of a task that actionscript can't handle: it can parse xml, dynamically load and play mp3 files, create accessible content, play video, access databases, control other flash movies, create user-editable vector shapes... it's got editable interface components like scroll bars and radio button clusters, it handles unicode and rich text fields, it can converse with director and javascript, it can integrate with application servers to create dynamic content, and it has chat functionality
((( ActionScripting is great, but it can't handle the functions required to create a commercial application, apart from CBT type educational programs, and even then Director is preferred over Flash. )))
having programmed in both director and flash, i can tell you that there is very little that director can do that flash can't, short of controlling video hardware or manipulating 3d content; flash, on the other hand, by virtue of its capacity for multiple timelines, can do quite a few things, simply and elegantly, that are impossible to replicate in director
((( Flash can NOT replace html, because flash is not an open standard. You can not write flash with vi. Flash is a commercial and proprietary product.)))
flash isn't "open," but it is publicly viewable, and the actionscript spec is open as well... you probably wouldn't want to write flash with vi, because your actionscripts are always attached to a flash object or frame, but there are plenty of third-party programs that edit and generate .swf files, and adobe even sells a competing program (livemotion) that uses actionscript (or perhaps a clone) as its scripting language
((( IF you're looking for "Potential power potent enough to alter the web" you need to look into XML. )))
among its many, many other talents, flash can parse and generate xml
((( Flash holds nothing for the power of the web. )))
spoken like someone who's never programmed in flash
i thought, therefore i was...
Now she speaks rapidly. "Do you know *why* you want to program?" ... this is your canvas! your clay! Go forth and create a masterwork!"
He shakes his head. He hasn't the faintest idea.
"For the sheer *joy* of programming!" she cries triumphantly.
"The joy of the parent, the artist, the craftsman. "You take a program,
born weak and impotent as a dimly-realized solution. You nurture the
program and guide it down the right path, building, watching it grow ever
stronger. Sometimes you paint with tiny strokes, a keystroke added here,
a keystroke changed there." She sweeps her arm in a wide arc. "And other
times you savage whole *blocks* of code, ripping out the program's very
*essence*, then beginning anew. But always building, creating, filling the
program with your own personal stamp, your own quirks and nuances. Watching
the program grow stronger, patching it when it crashes, until finally it can
stand alone -- proud, powerful, and perfect. This is the programmer's finest
hour!" Softly at first, then louder, he hears the strains of a Sousa march.
"This
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