Slashdot Mirror
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."
This is half the reason I dont use linux on the desktop. Now, get me a stable version of Photoshop CS, and I'm in.
Thank god, because the only thing the world needs more is more adoption of Flash.
I'm still waiting for Microsoft to port Office to Linux! Then I'll switch over.
All them emails I sent them finally paid off!!
Hopefully, this means that they'll take non-x86 platforms semi-seriously. ;b I'd like a PPC Flash plug-in, that's for certain.
Bít, zabít, jen proto, ze su liska!
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.
There are some software titles that just -need- to be ported to linux, do to lack of OSS alternatives. The Macromedia MX line of tools is -definately- one of those.
;D).
AFAIK, there is no alternative to Flash MX on Linux -- yes, Openoffice.org Impress will save to Flash, but to some designers, that's simply not powerful enough.
And Dreamweaver MX is the -only- wysiwyg editor that I will allow to touch my code. It works cleanly and with compatibility, something no other wysiwyg editor, even oss ones, can claim. (disclaimer: I code in gedit
On a side note -- didn't I read something a few months back about Adobe doing something similar with Photoshop?
Jay | http://oldos.org
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?
down with linux... uh I mean windows...um no.. uh...hmm!...down with cp/m cause everyone knows flash mx for cp/m sucked
Are they doing this as a response to SVG? Especially since Microsoft is "embracing and extending" SVG into WVG? It'd definitely be easier, without a Flash MX that runs on Linux, for Linux users to develop SVG than Flash. Many of the people that create interactive content that's as advanced as Flash are geeky enough to love or at least know how to get around in Linux.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
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
Oh Macromedia, please please please/b> bring DREAMWEAVER. I"m having a hell of a time with posting comments to Slashdot. It would make my life easier if I wouldn't have to do my own HMTL.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
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.
The more I delve into my job search here in Japan, I've come to realize how much Linux is growing on the minds of companies. Almost every company I've interviewed with has asked the "what experience do you have with Linux" question. I'm glad I installed Debian Woody last year and have been running that on a separate spare box here at home.
Until now, most multimedia production platforms have either been Windows or Mac based. But as the tools of Linux become better, especially with the recent improvements in KDE, Linux is seen and being used more and more as a desktop production platform. Because of this, software vendors are feeling their ears perk up in the direction of Linux.
While it may never take the lead in the Desktop wars, Linux will find a nice niche somewhere between Windows and Mac. Software vendors who do not take Linux seriously may find themselves and their competitive positions usurped by some other up and comer, if not someone else who wants to write a free version of the software.
I have been pwned because my
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.
I'm not sure I agree with the porting strategem. Getting MX to work on Wine is all fine and dandy, but basing the full port to Linux on the acceptance of the Wine port seems silly. Yes, I know it saves money doing it this way, but that's kind of like changing the tires on your 15-year-old car and expecting people to buy it for full price; not very likely. I have used Linux frequently, both as a software developer and an end-user, and I have rarely had any call to use Wine (though it is a great tool). As a developer, though, I would be really leery of using this kind of potentially unstable platform for my bread-and-butter work. The bottom line is that MX works on Windows, so I run it on Windows. If it gets ported fully to Linux with the same support and the Windows version, then great, I'd consider using it on Windows (especially if the same box came with both versions!) I'm not about to fiddle around getting it running on Linux, and I doubt many other developers will either. (Why are you so afraid of Linux, Macromedia??)
This could be an excellent move for Macromedia, since the Linux-platform is currently (still) being ignored by its archrival Adobe.
I'm an optimist, so I am sure that Adobe will eventually be convinced by the increased marketshare of Linux to port their applications over as well. But the sooner Macromedia gets a foothold in Linux in the meantime, the more of an advantage it will have when the time comes for Adobe to follow suit.
Since we're talking about Macromedia and Flash anyway: does anyone here know why the open-source Flash plugin hasn't been developed further by anyone? Macromedia's binary-only plugin lacks performance (and often stability) as well as platform-support, is currently still at version 6. Besides, the Flash 7 specs are publicly available anyway, so we wouldn't even have to reverse engineer the format to reimplement the plugin, right?
Perhaps such an open-source plugin could eventually even be integrated in the Mozilla directly? Or would that somehow be an undesirable idea?
"Oooh, does that mean we get to kick some puffy white mad zionist butt?"
slashdot crowd also expects them to:
1. Release the source under GPL
2. Give the product away for free
3. Hate Microsoft
Neither of which they do. So I predict this will be a complete failure.
They fix the Flash player first? I mean, jesus. Yeti Baseball shouldn't be using my entire CPU.
IMHO, there can never be too little Flash.
/usr/local/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so /usr/local/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so.temp
BTW for those who want to turn it off by default, all you need to do is rename the plugin, eg
mv
And if you REALLY need it, like those horrific sites that don't actually use HTML (car manufacturer sites are the worst offenders I come across) you can rename it back
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
Why not port a native Dreamweaver? There is NO decent WYSIWYG HTML editor on Linux. Flash is an accessory to Dreamweaver. People who want Flash can't work without a decent HTML editor. They definately won't edit their HTML in vi, so they won't buy Flash for Linux.
/, then you get to dig for the home directory.
WINE is a pain when it comes to drive letters.
First, it has a totally different view of the filesystem than every native app. It has a fake drive letter (Z: for instance) that leads to
Or, if you set up the home directory as H: or whatever, the user ends up looking for their H: drive from a native app.
WINE is unstable, even using the Crossover Office I bought to try to get my wife, the last holdout in my house, off of Windows.
PLEASE, Macromedia, don't use WINE to hack this together and please port the main application FIRST!!
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
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
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.
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
Much to the dismay of many of my designer friends, the last few development cycles for Flash have been focused on Flash as an application platform. Just take a look at their recent initiatives, Flex, Central - they're targeting the developer community.
Sad to say, lately their efforts haven't been going so well. Most of the people who are Flash programmers right now don't need new interfaces for creating Flash content because they're already acclimated to the old interface, and many programmers who aren't already in the Flash community aren't getting turned on by these changes to the tools because they already have strong opinions that they aren't open to changing. ("Flash is good for Strongbad, but why should I care?")
So, how do they attract more developers? By going where the developers want to go, to Linux. It might seem obvious here on Slashdot, but this is real leadership in the market in which they operate - let's hope it starts a cascade that turns into a flood.
Wow, Flash MX on Linux, natively? I might actually have to buy software!
Now if we could only get a port of FrontPage... :)
"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.
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.
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
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
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
Simply hit Ctrl-Meta-Shift-X-U-G, then Meta-Shift-Q-Shift-P-77, then type gvaomp-txt
... since everyone knows that's what emacs stands for anyway.
Don't worry, it becomes quite natural after a while.
I find it much more intuitive to remap it to Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
I used to use ColdFusion back when there was a good Linux server for it. I also used to code with HomeSite and/or ColdFusion Studio through WINE when I was coding for ColdFusion. When Macromedia bought Allaire, that all went to hell. Their next Linux server was for ColdFusion MX and it was a horrible product. Completely unreliable and completely rewritten to be a Java plugin to a plugin to Apache, rather than the native Apache module as it had been. Further, the CF community wouldn't hear from Macromedia for months at a time while they promised patches and updates galore.
Meanwhile, we returned our copy of ColdFusion MX Server, which wasn't that hard since the support staff was used to taking those calls. We stuck with the older CF server and are almost done porting to PHP. Further, eventually, I discovered Quanta and so no longer care about using HomeSite/CF Studio under WINE.
Obviously, our new setup doesn't take well to Flash, but that's for designers more than developers like us, so I don't feel a loss. We've found the free software world's equivalent and we've found it's better, cheaper, and far more reliable.
From the sound of it, they're going to do like Corel did and make WINE-compatible programs, but as I recall Corel actually had to package an entire WINE distribution with their software to make it work reliably - not exactly efficient. We'll see, but it's going to be awhile before I trust Macromedia to do anything good with Linux for a bit.
-N
I've nothing to say here...
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.
"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?