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Macromedia to Port Flash MX to Linux?
LnxAddct writes "An article on CNet reports that Macromedia will start taking Linux more seriously. It will start this new initiative by making it's suite of tools run easily under WINE, then depending on the response it gets, it will port it's tools natively to Linux! Their Chief Software Architect, Kevin Lynch, stated, 'What we've been investigating is, When will it be time to bring our tools to Linux? I think it might be happening now.' Maybe 2004 will be the year of Linux."
Actualy having your QA team try it and consider Wine bugs real bugs... I mean...they have access to the official source code... How many things don't run in Wine because of an half buggy splash screen, a messed up installer, or because they rounded up the corners using some "features" (read: bugs) of Windows to their advantage... That would be how: by actualy trying those things... Lots of things that dont work in Wine, would with a few hours of cleaning up code... If I remember well, its even written somewhere on the Wine page, that programs can be made "for" Wine, and will then work flawlessly in both environnements...
I'm not sure if it was so much Adobe as it was Disney and 2 other unnamed companys paying codeweavers lots of money to get Photoshop 7 (was current at the time) running in Crossover Office/Wine.
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
Many of it's features were integrated from Homesite, which I was using to program Cold Fusion web pages back in 1996. They took the 'coder's editor'(Homesite) and integrated it with he 'designers editor'(Dreamweaver) and created one Really Powerfull web desing app.
My only problem with it is that the latest version 2004MX is kinda slow on my computer. My computer is an Athlon 1900+/512MG. Most programs are pretty snappy on my system. I'm holding off upgrading until I get the final HL2/Doom3 specs :)
That's their point. They are going to work to get Flash working well in WINE, hopefully on the same level that Office works with Crossover (which is really WINE). WINE can work damn well, it just usually doesn't, unless it's been tuned for a specific app, or the app's been tuned to it.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
The F4L project (at sourceforge) is already working on an open source alternative to Macromedia's monopoly. The GUI is already in place in version .01, and there are already libraries in the wild for editing .SWF files (based on information released by Macromedia), so it is only a matter of developer time before it is finished.
I run the F4L Documentation Project. You can chat about F4L at irc.freenode.net and #F4L
Center for Student Developed Education Policy
On the whole I agree with you, however; I feel the need to add a couple of caveats:
WINE does not, as a general rule, work well with games, since it does not impliment DirectX, so your experience with games cannot be directly translated to non DirectX applications.
In the case of said games it was you trying to get them to run. In this case it is the orginal code author trying to get it to run. That difference may prove significant.
That said, a proper native port would be preferable.
KFG
Something that endless consume your processor speed (like a little movie) while you're reading a text or with a lot of tabs/windows open, it's definitly not the way I want to expend my processor time.
I think you may have some other problems, if you can't play a Flash movie without crushing your performance. As I type this, I have an 800x600 Flash movie playing, 5 other instances (and probably 15 tabs) of Firefox running, as well as an active connection to a busy MUD, AIM, etc....With no appreciable slowdown at all. And this is on a 4 year-old P3 667.
As others have said above me, the problem is not with Flash itself, but with how people use it. Yes, it can be used to make annoying ads and interfaces, but it can also be used to make some pretty damn neat things as well.
You mean like the Flash Click To View plugin?
It turns all Flash animations into a little button - which loads and shows the flash animation only when you click on it.
no kidding...every time it creates the directory...every time i delete it afterwards... my computer is cluttered enough with crap that i don't need programs assuming how i organize things - and provide NO way to change the default behavior...
Gekido's Lair
instead of increasing the number of platforms that their products work on, adobe has been reducing it... premiere no longer works on mac (once considered THE platform for premiere) because of heavy reliance on the windows media format in the latest premiere version (can use wmv as a 'native' format for editing)... i doubt that adobe will clue into linux, we'll have to rely on hoping that the gimp folks will figure out how to make an interface that is comprehensible and we can get rid of photoshop once and for all
Gekido's Lair
Wine is probably the most ambitious OSS project around... cloning the Win32 API is no small feat. I know where your bitterness comes from, but that was then. WINE really is about there... Crossover Office is just a few steps ahead of Wine at any given time, and it runs Office flawlessly, and other apps too.
I use the Crossover version of WINE every day and I don't have any complaints. It does what I need it to do. And considering it just as a porting library to speed up porting efforts to Linux is an entirely reasonable thing to do.
Long term WINE is going to be an important part of moving people off of Windows.
Yeah, I mean, christ, AcroRead6 even displays a freaking little ad button on the toolbar now. One time installing that POS taught me to only use version 5.1, conveniently available from the text-only download page.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
You might want to try out Quanta. It's been making great strides recently, and its visual (WYSIWYG-ish) layer looks like it will be the best thing since sliced bread. In any case, it is one of the programs with the most devoted following in linux-land.
hold the shift key while acrobat loads. it will start up in 1 or 2 seconds then, because it doesnt load the plugin this way.
IAAL
Uhm, CMYK is not patented - it's just the standard way colour printing works (subtractive color model). I think you're confusing it with Pantone, which is widely used for colour /matching/ is most certainly requires a licencing fee.
-- Sig Sig Sputnik
There are however a _lot_ of patents for converting from colourspace to CMYK, a fair number of which are held by Adobe.
Pantone is primarily a spot colour standard (they provide a swatch book which shows what a given colour will look like on coated or uncoated stock), w/ a library of swatches for use on a display to approximate that. They also have a CMYK - equivalency list which shows which Pantone colours can be approximated by CMYK. And they've since branched out to offering a list of RGB swatches which allow one to pick an RGB colour which (in theory, on a colour callibrated monitor) will match a range of official Pantone libraries. These libraries are protected by trademark and copyright, and the methods used to get at the derivatives by patent.
That said, the big problem is that there's no way to do an ink representation in GIMP --- a generalized method of doing this would get one CMYK ``for free'', and allow one to do spot colour monotones, duotones, tritones &c. Possibly even Hexachrome (printing w/ six colours for an extend colour range). There's a British company (Cerilica) w/ a wonderfully cool system for this, Truism --- I _really_ wish Macromedia had listened when I suggested they license that tech.
I've a list of books in my bibliography on my web page which cover this sort of thing (ob. discl. I'm an Amazon Associate). Check out _Four Colors / One Image_ and _Duotones, Tritones and Quadtones_ for specifics.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.