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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."
They might as well just come out and say they will not support Linux. My experiences with WINE have been, shall I say, bitter. I've managed to get a few games running with it, but never without significant hassle or loss of resources (sound, fullscreen, etc.).
The roadmap to desktop acceptance for Linux cannot go through WINE.
While I applaud any efforts to get more software running natively on Linux, I have to ask: why Flash? I mean as far as most of us are concerned, it's the scourge of the internet, responsible for a slew of poorly designed sites, bad flash movies, and anoying advertisements. If Macromedia wants to go after the Linux crowd, wouldn't a more appreciable tool like Dreamweaver be a better choice?
about time they figured out that people actually use Linux. they have Unix ports of their stuff like Coldfusion so why not make everything cross-platform. this is something Adobe should start doing.
http://www.geocities.com/baddsectorr
This move by Macromedia could be a big one because it would give a serious leg up on Adobe. For whatever reason, Adobe has steadfastly refused to acknowledge the Linux market. Where is Photoshop? Gimp is no Photoshop. It is good but no Photoshop. Photoshop on Linux alone would be monstrous, but why don't they do it? Who knows.
Anyway, if Macromedia really wanted to scoop Adobe, this is the one way to do it.
No trees were harmed in the composition of this; however, numerous electrons were inconvenienced.
They fix the Flash player first? I mean, jesus. Yeti Baseball shouldn't be using my entire CPU.
After years and years of "oh, how wonderful it would be if the net were truly a multimedia platform," the only toolset, and I mean ONLY toolset that offers solid animation and compatible sound capabilities on Linux, Mac and Windows, which is also, by the way, completely cross-platform, is Macromedia Flash.
There is also an installed base of some 500 million players. That's why it needs to be ported to Linux.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
The Apple plug-in is significantly inferior to the PC one. Not trolling here, it just is, it's bigger, and runs slower.
This is one of the easiest things to benchmark.
MX2004 is supposed to be a big improvement, but I'm skint, so I don't know.
I can't even think about linux on the desktop untill adobe ports photoshop. this is the show stopper at are company.
if adobe is reading this...come on...get on the ball you don't need microsoft, your software on windows is half assed anyways (Pagemaker). also photoshop et al. have been ported to MacOS X so it can't be that hard to port and support a *nix env., if i remember correctly you had a unix port at one time. so come on allready.
You sure fill those PDF forms with xpdf too? Quite commonly used by government agencies in Finland.
OTOH, you're still right that reades sucks on Linux - you can only fill the forms with ascii characters, which is not so funny when your alphabet uses 3 extra characters in addition to English ones...
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
I switched to Gentoo Linux on my laptop and desktop a few weeks ago, and am VERY pleased with OpenOffice (the Ximian Edition)
I can follow powerpoints in class almost perfectly, there's the odd Bullet List Screw-Up, but it's a project that has matured wonderfully.
I no longer have ANY reason to run Windows, and I do alot of things, like:
- DV Capturing via FireWire
- Video Editing with LVE
- Instant Messaging
- Writing Documents, Spreadsheets, etc
- Wireless Networking
- VNC to some of my Customers' Desktops
- EMail via Ximian Evolution
- Reading PDF Files (via GNOME's built-in app)
- Writing PDF Files (via CUPS PDF Printer)
- Playing Quake, etc....
Why run Windows anymore? My computer is actually stable now!
A few months back I had the opportunity to talk with a representative from Adobe who said that they have no plans to release any of their products for Linux until there is a larger customer base.
Unfortunately, this has become the chicken-and-egg scenario, where vendors won't make software for Linux until there are more people using it, while there will never be people migrating to Linux until there is more software that will run on it.
As much as I hate it, I feel that WINE is a good intermediate step in this situation, because it gives Macromedia a low-commitment opportunity to feel out the Linux market without fully porting the software.
You may have been marked funny, and perhaps even writing in jest or indeed poking fun at us! But I think when it comes down to it that's one of the big obstacles to converting people to Linux and I am one of the people who's all for converting more people to Linux. market share = application writer attention = better for all of us.
I think a port of MS Office to Linux is likely one of the later ports that will happen, but applications like Flash and other general productivity ones will keep up the interest of all other software houses. There are dozens of big name applications I'd like to see released for Linux. They don't necessarily have to be open source themselves either. Imagine if Linux had a 50% market share just because Macromedia, Adobe, Microsoft and others released big name apps? that would be twenty times the user base we have now, twenty times the coders and twenty times the gamers and twenty times the bug reports.
How much better could Linux get if it were that popular? Unstoppably so
The uncrackable mac
You can speed up Acrobat significantly by getting rid of unneeded plugins, either by deleting them or moving them to another directory. There are only a small handful you'll ever actually use. It could still stand to be a lot faster, but it's better than it comes out of the box.
"Well then you have never seriously worked with Photoshop"
You're correct. But even w/ my limited knowledge in PS, gimp is much closer to PS, than win3.1 is to OSX. For the average user, gimp is very well a PS replacement. To say otherwise, would obviously mean that a PS bias is present.
Now, as a linux user, it's always good to see big name proprietary software ported. I've been waiting for FlashMX for a long while.
There are some software titles that just -need- to be ported to linux, do to lack of OSS alternatives.
Wrong. We don't "just need" any proprietary software to be ported to Linux. We do need to get behind the projects that are developing OSS alternatives and support them both community-style and financially. We also need to gather support of the business community, focusing on software that will save them money. ex.) "You spend $10,000/year on Macromedia tools? Support our project and you can drop that expense within 2 years."
I personally would gladly donate $100 to a professionally run project implementing SVG solutions so we can ditch Flash once and for all. I would donate more if it would give me a vote in future feature development. If we can buy Blender in a few month's time, we can surely pool enough resources to do this.
"Why to people actually like flash? Hard for me to fathom."
.GIFs etc.
Flash isn't the problem, it's how it's used. The difference? Kill Flash and people who set out to be annoying will use other methods, like huge animated
Flash is actually pretty slick. Fortunately it's being used more tastefully these days, though there are some who still need to learn that lesson.
I guess what I'm saying is it'd be far more productive to teach people about using it tastefully than it is to bitch about the existence of it.
"Derp de derp."
How about a flash 7 plugin guys?
The reason they want their tools to work under Wine is simple. People will use them instead of code a replacement. Ming exists but isn't anywhere as easy to use as Flash. They're probably worried someone will make a Flash clone that will output swf and svg files and be OpenSource. That would kill their market for Flash.
The Flash plugin is a pretty good example. Its a version behind. It enough that most people aren't going to bother coding their own viewer but not exactly Macromedia's top priority.
In all honesty, the dropping of Premiere support had more to do with Final Cut Pro being a far superior product than it did Windows reliance.
The Win 3.1/OSX comparison is really quite fair if you use Photoshop or Gimp for more than photoresizing and color correction. PS just has a FAR deeper and more robust toolset. It's not better at everything (Gimps interface is faster on my systems than PS, I like some of Gimps tools better), but over all it is a much better package.
Actually, you know what? A better comparison would be Win95 to WinXP. Everything is vaguely the same, but Win95 just doesn't feel as FINISHED as XP.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
Right on!
Friends don't let friends use flash.
Someone hates these cans.
Flash is smooth, it allows you to do a lot of fancy stuff, like annoying ads and badly designed web sites, but say sweet good bye to your CPU. What I mean by that is anytime I visit a page with flash I see a 10-20% increase in CPU usage per embeded flash. In some cases I have had my CPU usage at 80% until I closed all web page with flash in it. For this reason I ask Macromedia to please be considerate with my CPU. Maybe we need an option to be able to do a 'nice' on plug-ins?
If it makes a difference, my browser is Mozilla. If you want an example of CPU usage and Flash visit http://movies.yahoo.com/oscars/
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
1) Take a reasonably useful product.
2) Add bloat and adverts.
3) Loss!
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
It's called "Testing The Waters". If Linux is gonna be a worthwhile platform for Macromedia to adopt, they need to do a little recon first. If Flash gets picked up on Linux under Wine, you can bet the next rewrite will be offered natively on Linux.
Personally, I'm rooting for a Fireworks MX via Wine to hit the market, cuz Macromedia could corner the for-pay Linux market there before Adobe ever thinks of porting Photoshop.
Sure, it might make quite a few people rabid microsoft haters. But it's still only a tiny percentage of the population who gives a shit. In fact, outside of slashdot and linux/mac specific forums, not much of anyone seems to have any righteous indignation over Microsoft (unless they hate the rich in general). I don't hate Microsoft that much. I just hate all their products. I'm become less and less willing to get infuriated about their business practices, except maybe them bank rolling SCO to attack Linux, but now I'm rambling...
Feel free to mod me "-1 - Angry Jerk".
Something like three years it was absolutely clear with *everyone* in the professional IT field that Linux/OSS would take off and soar. It went just as generally predicted, only did I lose a bet that Macromedia would have ported at least one app from the dreamteam to Linux within 2 years.
And here is why they're to late for me to collect my dinner out:
During the dot-bomb Flash was everybodys darling. There was no way you could design a solid site with predictable Layout behaviour without using flash. CSS was so crappy everyone just plain ignored it after playing with it for 2 hours. If you wanted a webdoc that was more than just a string of characters you had to use flash.
Then came the bomb, the web grew up within 6 months flat, Flash was to crappy for solid client side apps and the remaining pros switched to functional sites, also ditching Dreamweavers template engine for the bazillion OSS CMSes popping up left right and center. In the mean time IE and Netscape 6.1/Mozilla finally fullfilled the promise CSS had been making for 5 years. That all together weighed in on MM. Flash lost big chunks of it's significance on a monthly basis.
Nowadays Sites are cool and don't need no flash whatsoever.
But here's a really interessting thing: I happend to work on a Rich Media Framework in Flash MX 2004 Pro. After 2.5 years ignoring it I was in pretty fast again. (Sidenote: Customer and Partners agreed to GPL it once the bills are payed!) I actually had to install Windows to do it. While the IDE still has the typical super-crappy anoying macromedia glitches and quirks in it, ActionScript 2 has become a full range PL. ECMA compliance, error handling, a stack of oreilly books for it and all. Rolling an XML controlled industry leading E-Learn-Player and Webpresentation framework was a piece of cake and took me and a guy I work with no more than 8 weeks. On top of that, Macromedia is getting a drift before anybody else in the app vendor field: Their newest product 'breeze', doesn't come in a box anymore. They sell it as a service!
I presume that they saw income going down after the bomb and hushed and listend to the experts. I think there is a strong developers team with them that is seriously fed up with the crappy underlyings in their products (just like many of the professional customers) and that they have gotten a chance to call the shots. Not only is MM doing some very smart moves as a corp. right now, but a Flash MX 2k5 Pro for Linux would bring me right back onto their list. MM has had a steady revenue stream through nice packaging. Now that that doesn't work anymore, they're doing the next step. If I were to bet a fistfull of stockshares on a closed source software vendor, they'd be my first choice.
Linux/OSS is rolling and there ain't no stopping it. And now that MM isn't everybody darling anymore they have to shape up and comply.
All good news indeed.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
How much better could Linux get if it were that popular?
Seems like you don't realise that the only real edge Linux has over Windows is the fact that it's not popular, Joe Average OS.
When Linux get as popular as Windows, you'll also get all the bugs, all the bloatware, all the spyware, all the idiots, all the exploits and all the garbage you get with Windows. Getting Flash ported is an obvious step in that direction...
Be careful what you wish for, you probably won't like it when you get it.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
"Flash isn't the problem, it's how it's used."
Flash is a problem in my mind because it is not configurable for the client. It gives complete control to the creators, which sounds all wonderful, but the creators do not have my interest in mind. I have to either block it or watch it. Can I set a Flash window not to loop by default? Can I turn off sound for all instances of the player? Can I limit the amount of data the player can download?