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The Future of Flash
An anonymous reader writes "Adobe is celebrating the 10th anniversary of Flash, and News.com has an article looking at the company's plans for the future of the technology. No longer just a choice for 'innovative' web designers, Adobe is positioning Flash as an application development platform, with special emphasis on video delivery and mobile device applications." From the article: "On Tuesday, the company intends to launch a microsite showing the evolution of Flash over the past 10 years, including video interviews with developers. Those videos will no doubt be played with the Flash Video Player, something many high-profile Web sites, including YouTube, have chosen to use as well. The success of Flash in the next 10 years rides largely on whether leading-edge customers like YouTube will design their Web sites with Flash, Lynch said. Adobe, which gained the Flash technology when it bought Macromedia, is trying to build an 'ecosystem' of developers and partners, he said. "
... "just say no".
No Flash for me, It takes way to much bandwidth what I do is make each frame and save it as a bmp and use JavaScript to load each frame by frame, It saves a load on bandwidth! Vs. Piggy Flash
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Well, since I am on Linux and a 64 bit variant, I guess it will be another 10 years when I get to see the presentation.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Who cares about the future of flash when http://www.nearlygood.com/video/endofworld.html THE END OF THE WORLD is near!
is to be made irrelevant by something else that works on all platforms and is cheaper/free/OSS.
Shouldn't they make it compatible with *nix then? Last time I remember thinking about Flash it didn't work... if it does now, please let me know.
--Valthan
(empty space)
That's right. I have no plans for Flash.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Are you actually serious? It's just got menus and some streamed videos. All of that has been done before.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
...right after the blink tag.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Though people will end up hating flash for the sole reason of it taking up a lot of bandwidth, not everyone is content with a text only product. Functionality is the most importent feature for any application but visual impression helps a log way in the success of any application.
until I realized that it looked shitty on slower computers and only had Flash 7 on x86 Linux. I can't even play FancyPantsAdventure with it. And, it can be incredibly annoying. Worst is when you force flash to use a site at all. With AJAX technologies and dynamically-created sites, is their really a need for Flash sites? I can see it for games or small applets, but for an entire site (like some car websites), do you even need it? More to the point, should you even need it?
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
I've started using Flash inside my development environment, but I use it to capture and annotate onscreen application sessions so I can show the developers what's going wrong. (It avoids a lot of "I can't reproduce it and can't find the time to make it over to a computer where it can be reproduced, so I'm not going to do it" B.S.)
Remember the mid-1990s deluge of shovelware? Every new PC came with a towering stack of bad CD-ROM apps that were "OMG interactive multimedia CD-ROM technology!!!!@#$%" consisting of little more than Quicktime videos and the old crappy Macromedia Projector.
*shudder* Never again!
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
i booed on them right on that article
but ya flash blows
they have terrible or no support for most architectures/OSes out there
and for a 'web application' platform thats just flat out unacceptable
they did release a 32bit only version 7 for linux, but there have been what? 2 other versions and a 3rd coming since then? and none of them work on linux..
also they dont have 64bit support
and as far as i know it ONLY works on x86
so if you write your interactive web application using ajax then it works on nearly every operating system known to man.. or flash and it works only on one
Flash: Gaudy or ostentatious display.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
a-aaaaa! He'll save every one of us!
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Flash is in the same space as Ajax, and has been for a while. And with something like 95% browser penetration, Flash is a great way to create browser-independent websites.
Flash is far more robust and elegant than the slashdot crowd gives it credit for being. It has a powerful object-oriented language and frameworks enabling ant builds, unit testing, aspect-oriented coding, and almost every other buzzword out there. If you gave up on it 5 years ago, check it out again. It so isn't your daddy's flash these days.
Or better yet, keep insulting Flash while I keep making money off it.
In the past I've always classified flash as a cute toy that web designers play with to get some interactivity that consisted of timelines and hiding little snippets of code in obscure places in the timeline.
However over the past month I've been imersing myself in the Flash world and have been amazed.
Did you know...
- You don't have to use the Flash IDE to create applications, you can use:
Eclipse (My preferred environment for this)
FlashDevelop
Notepad/Emacs/vi + a compiler
A crapton of other environments
Flex Builder (another adobe product)
- You never have to deal with a timeline if you don't want to.
- Real object-orientated programming is possible.
- Actionscript 3 (available in Flash Player 9) is clearly targetted at developers and not designers and removes many of the oddities of AS2 that you may have heard about.
- Real applications, not web toys can be created.
- With the upcomming apollo runtime, native applications can be created with full access to all machine resources.
- There's a ton of open source libraries out there
Want an IoC container like Spring? Sure!
Want a port of the java swing library? Sure!
- The new version of Flex Builder (the environment targetted at developers) is simply an eclipse plugin.
- Adobe is now making tools and libraries available free of charge to developers. (not the whiz-bang IDE's, but compilers, libraries, etc.)
Too many site developers love this kind of crap; they want you to be captive to their vision of a web page, with absolutely no way to skip the commercials or peek under the hood.
I've stopped doing business with any website which demands I use Flash to place an order or, even worse, just browse the catalog.
"...a date which will live in infamy."
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The only reason that YouTube, Google Video et al adopted Flash as their video player client was because Flash is pretty much universal, and it's easier to convert videos into a Flash video file than to deal with all the compatibility issues that come with embedding a Windows Media / Quicktime / RealVideo file. Nothing wrong with that, because Flash was designed to be an animation / movie player, and moving to full motion video isn't that big of a step.
What Flash is not is an API, at least not in terms of developing complex applications. The first thing wrong with that is that Flash itself is very closed compared to open HTML. Getting a screen-reader to work with Flash is a Herculean effort that I'm pretty sure nobody has yet accomplished. The second thing is that you're basically limited to working with Flash alone as your presentation layer. Want to do AJAX-like things? Sure, but you have to do it Adobe's way or not at all. Want to have server-side execution of certain things? OK, but you have to go through Flash's weird ActionScript connection points and are limited to what Adobe has programmed into it. This will allow them to do a bunch of things to lock those already developing in Flash into staying there as moving to another environment (like, I don't know, HTML with server-side processing) would take too much effort.
Flash is great for certain things, but for complicated web applications, stick with HTML. It's already universal, you won't have compatibility issues if written well, and you can keep your animations embedded. Just keep them separate from the rest of the page. Nothing annoys me more than a website run entirely in Flash.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I don't think I have ever enjoyed browsing a site that has exclusively used flash. One of the biggest benefits of HTML is a standardization of GUI controls, with flash that goes right out the window. The only flash sites I have seen that are not totally annoying and worthless are from car manufacturers, they have huge budgets to spend on design and development of their sites, even then they are substandard to HTML sites in usability.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001029.html
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/main.html
http://dack.com/web/flash_evil.html
I spent about half an hour looking for a company's site last week. I knew the company name, but couldn't guess the URL. I'd tried a dozen searches till finally I found a forum post that linked to it. Of course, the entire front page and all navigation was in Flash, so it was totally invisible to Google's searchbot. And it didn't do anything that couldn't have been done just as easily in vanilla HTML
I've been doing Flash/AS professionally since the 5.0 days. The plattform has come a long way. For one, it actually has become a plattform, and not just some crappy IDE with a little scripting bolted on. Allthough not percieved as such, it's even closer to open source right now than Java. AS 2&3, MTASC, osflash.org and the GNU Gnash project continue to add OSS credibility and non-slashdot-bullshitting awareness in the developer community. I didn't like the hickup in the release line of the official Linux Flash Player though. If Flash won't reliably support Linux, it's a no-go for me and quite a few other serious Flash developers. The dev-laps of Macromedia where a nice place to get that straight to the devteam of flash and they got the message.
All in all it's clear that if Adope doesn't screw around to much they can't do much wrong. It's still the most widespread plattform ever with nearly zero-fuss cross plattform deployment via the web. You get a high profile independant VM, with a security model and security policy that remains unmatched in RIAs. And a rock-solid ECMA compliant OOP language along with it.
Ajax just isn't in that league. Nice for the one or other drag-and-drop gadget or small-scale data sync but that's about it.
XUL maybe will get there someday, if they get their stuff sorted out and manage to build a hassle-free XUL-Runner plugin for all major browsers. But I don't see that happening anytime soon.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
"Video delivery" system? More like popup, malware, virus delivery system.
Actually, check out Design is Kinky (it's work safe despite the name) and go through some of the sites they link. Some of the designers do things with flash that are amazing. Another site, Beatport (online store for EDM labels) uses a flash interface which I prefer to use primarily because it's easy to browse and listen to samples without reloading, popups or using external apps like winamp.
Granted there is some pretty hideous uses of flash (advertising) but that's on the downside and with adblock it becomes pretty managable.
"The success of Flash in the next 10 years rides largely on whether leading-edge customers like YouTube will design their Web sites with Flash."
Obviously Flash needs customers in order to be successful, what makes the article worth reading is Lynch disscussing his strategy for keeping Flash successful. Lynch says he wants Flash to work well with other systems like AJAX as a means of keep Flash relevant and useful. Apparently this is something that Google Finance already does, and Macromedia is encouraging similar things rather than being scared of competition.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Flash is a great product, but every webpage need not have it. Flash itself in most cases for me is a bandwidth hog. Future versions should become more streamlined.
Flash would be ok if there was an OFF switch!
Flash is so annoying with all of the blinking, flashing garbage it displayes on your screen. If I could toggle it off and on then it wouldn't be so bad. I know firefox has a plugin which is supposed to do this but it doesn't seem to work on all of the flash content hence... I never install Flash on any of my computers.
I think this is more like remembering Perl Harbor.
Thanks, I'll be here all week. Oh, and try the Flash-Fried Content, and don't forget to tip your web servers. Ba-da-bing!
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I find it very difficult to imagine Flash succeeding as an application development platform for a number of reasons:
First of all, with the "web 2.0" trend, the release of MS's ATLAS framework, and google's slow but steady amassing of "online apps" it is clear that the shift towards the Internet as an application platform is inevitable. That being said, as a developer trying to stay ahead of the curve am I more likely to invest my time into learning Flash, its frames, and actionscript or will I focus on building more intricate web apps using Visual Studio and a language that I am already familiar with?
Secondly, Google has proven that the KISS rule applies to web development. I don't want a web tool that has a flashy preloader everytime I click a button, panels flying wildy across the screen, and ambient background music. I just want a solid app that does what I need it to do.
When will it be possible to watch one of these youtubes where the audio will be in synch with the video?
A decade of a product they just recently purchased?
Macromedia made flash ubiquitous on the web, like it or not.
Then Adobe-come-lately appears on the scene, and we start getting "flash bugs"; every single site requests local storage; Flash causes more browser crashes than ever...
Sorry, Adobe, but you don't get the credit here. The profits, yes, but no Kudos for you!
pictured here (Flash not required for viewing).
The best we can hope for at this stage is that macradobe bloat the flash player like their unusable PDF reader. I wouldn't compile flash player if it was availiable as source, and I especially don't want to see applications bundling it. Nope, the mere mention of flash having a future depresses me too much to bother to RTFA.
Flash is in the same space as Ajax, and has been for a while.
Flash: Client-side animation component.
AJAX: Javascript that connects to a server-side script to select / create / update / delete data and update the page.
Completely different.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I'm with the rest of you guys, I too would like to see flash opened up, but more specifically, I am a linux user, and I am happy, and yes, it kicks ass.
Go linux developers! Make an application far Superior to Flash 9.0!
I'll just uhh, stand by the side lines in total support.. Don't worry, I have flags and everything, surly that's be enough encouragement!
With any luck, in 10 years, maybe their documentation won't be disgraceful. Their support system is terrible and their platform support is more or less non-existent. Likewise, their product frankly is just very unpolished and bloated/buggy.
They need to clean up their act.
Somebody should develop a proprietary scripting language embedded inside flash embedded inside dhtml/javascript. Cause as we all know, the more nested layers of closed-architecture, write once, run one-place, functional redundancy a page has the cooler it is.
You are completely wrong about this. Flash is a client side rich client that can communicate asynchronously with a server. (look at yahoo maps for an example). Animation is a small part of what flash is used for.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
Until Flash player 8/9 is available for Linux, boycott adobe (not that you shouldn't anyways)
In the future, software like this will be free.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
That's weird because we've been developing an application that uses Flash as a front-end and MySQL/PHP as the server-side and haven't had any issues with "connection points". Are you sure you know what you're talking about?
Pardon, but you don't know what you're talking about.
Flashs accessability follows official standards for RIA plattforms by the book. And there's enough ammo that has "Flash is more accessible than HTML" written on it. I'll build a site that's perfect for blind people to navigate in flash - and they won't even need a screenreader.
Since AS 2 it's been an industry strength plattform and VM, with nearly all ties to the official IDE cut. Security is next to paranoid and because it's also monolithic plattform it's considered a reliable and easy to develop for.
Then again, you actually need to be able to develop webapps that don't suck. If used correctly a full-blown flash only site can be the best web experience ever. And, admitted, there are very few people who can do it right. Then again you've got the same thing with websites. 80% crap, 10% so-so, 10% ok and good. Same with flash.
Then again, the flash-bashers are getting less and less and the community of serious flash developers is growing steady, so future isn't that bleak.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
AJAX: Javascript that connects to a server-side script to select / create / update / delete data and update the page.
Flash can do that too. It can communicate via text, xml, json, remoting, webservices and other ways that aren't coming to mind. I suggest you check out the book Flash for Server Geeks for more information
The only reason that YouTube, Google Video et al adopted Flash as their video player client was because Flash is pretty much universal
As long as you're not running 64-bit... I end up running vmware or firefox in a chroot whenever I need to access a page that runs flash. Both are a major pain. You can't even fire off konqueror in a chroot as it tries to talk to the 64-bit versions that are already running and gets confused.
This is the problem with proprietary protocols - you are supported only if the vendor feels it meets their business plans.
What is wrong with just putting an avi file using an open codec on your website? Why does it HAVE to be flash? And if you need vector graphics what is wrong with SVG?
what tool are you using for recording the sessions?
My guess is Captivate. I've used it before, it's pretty good for creating demos.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
That's the safe bet if you can't use regular mpeg. If you put the wrong kind of compression between your bitmap and transmission, you might be sued for violating someone's lame software patent.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Sorry, but flash is too proprietary, doesn't work with all the features on linux and is an insult to blinds and visually impaired peoples. 95% browser penetration isn't an excuse for leaving visually impaired people out. But it's an excuse for HTML impaired developpers to make pseudo websites.
The only reason that YouTube, Google Video et al adopted Flash as their video player client was because Flash is pretty much universal, and it's easier to convert videos into a Flash video file than to deal with all the compatibility issues that come with embedding a Windows Media / Quicktime / RealVideo file. Nothing wrong with that, because Flash was designed to be an animation / movie player, and moving to full motion video isn't that big of a step.
Except of course the fact that Flash always seems to have audio-visual sync issues (the audio usually falls behind the video). This is OK for stupid YouTube clips, but is annoying. Even animations like JibJab seem to sometimes have these timing issues. I don't know what the problem is, but it always makes me unhappy when I see the flash plugin start.
At least it doesn't crash my browser as much anymore.
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
Here's my link contribution to what I would consider "Quality Flash Work."
http://www.beautifully-webdesign.net/
The thing about Flash is that many designers and artists use it to create pieces of art, animated or dynamic in form. For these people, Flash is used to a different end than what a typical commercial or information website might use it for, which in many cases amounts to abuse of Flash.
I think it's a little hippocritical of the general slashdot user to complain about the restrictive political climate and it's often infringing acts on the creative rights of their citizens, yet dismiss Flash as a merit-less platform for art, music and other creative ideas. Somehow, I think these slashdot users are also the same people who spend too much time on sites like albinoblacksheep or newgrounds.
Hades, PoD: Official Advocate
Most people, even techie ones, have a very limited view of what Flash can do. If you spend the time, most folks are surprised with the depth of the Flash development environment and start to see what you can do when you step beyond the basic animation and moving stuff around. I work on highly technical, interactive simulation for the medical industry. My apps are built mostly in Flash, with .Net backends that are highly interactive exercises that teach cardiologists to analyze the latest medical imagery and improve their real-world skills.
These programs are light-years beyond most people's perception of flash. If you don't close your mind to the possibilities, Flash is an incredible development tool and let's my company do things that would not be possible with any other technology. Perfectly cross platform (and face it, Linux doesn't matter to most people), interactive, pretty easy data transfer, reusable GUIs via XML data storage, etc. Flash is near perfect for alot more than just tweening text.
Am I the only one who, when reading the word "Flash", hears it in the voice of Roscoe P Coltrane?
The second thing is that you're basically limited to working with Flash alone as your presentation layer. Want to do AJAX-like things?
CHeck out Google Finance for a cool mix of AJAX and Flash.
I hope Linux is in their plans for Flash.. Mac PPC = Flash 9 Mac Intel = Flash 9 -- they made sure this was out no matter what, Flash 9 for Intel is not Stable yet.. Windows = Flash 9 Linux = Flash 7 --- reason for not upgrading yet is because Adobe is Mac whore.
Linux, because a PC is a terrible thing to waste.
Two of those articles have written 5-6 years back.
I wish the future of Flash was a Java "Flash" class that runs Flash movies in a Java VM. ActionScript is supposedly ECMA-standard, so that class ought not depend on Macromedia, or Sun, to be developed.
FWIW, I'd love to see a Flash movie that runs Java bytecode, too. The more the merrier. Especially on mobile phones, where these two VMs are the only real option for interactive client applet development.
--
make install -not war
"they have terrible or no support for most architectures/OSes out there"
Most as in the number you can count on your hand, or most as in percentage of the market covered? By your count, Windows would count the same as a Commadore 64.
There is no reason for a company to spend money on a product that generates no income or benefit of any kind. If you want to use a fringe computing platform, go ahead but don't complain when it's unsupported. Web developers are free to ignore you when you represent an immeasurable portion of the market.
How well do AJAX applications run in browsers with javascript disabled? How well does AJAX support cross-platform video?
...and they won't even need a screenreader.
Well, thanks for telling them what they need! Here's my question: If they want to use a screen reader, could they?
If used correctly a full-blown flash only site can be the best web experience ever.
I disagree.
First off, there are the compatibility issues that are mentioned elsewhere through this thread (like the lack of a Flash 9 for Linux). So assuming you're coding for Flash 9 players, you're basically limiting yourself to the Windows crowd, which is almost as bad as using Microsoft-proprietary HTML / CSS extensions.
Second, are you really going to argue that Flash is more accessible than HTML, which is basically plaintext? For a search engine to follow Flash links, you have to have separate, invisible links below the Flash embed in the HTML. If a website is pure Flash throughout, you completely break the back button and any in-site history. Sure, you could code your own back button, but that's once again completely proprietary and different for each site, whereas sites in HTML allow the user to click the buttons in their browser, which are always in the same position.
Third, sites coded using HTML / CSS allow the user to change the display of a page to match their own personal preferences. Let's say your vision is bad and you want to make the site high contrast, or you're colourblind and want to make the site easier to see. With CSS, correctly implemented, the user can replace the presentation and formatting of a page so they can make these changes rather easily. Try doing that in a Flash app without the author having to code these separate styles themselves. It can't be done.
So you stay with your proprietary apps coded in Flash. Perhaps control is more important to you than accessibility. I'll stay with HTML, a universal standard.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Your comment reminds me of the point that what makes Flash successful isn't the technology in Flash itself (a VM BTW (2)). But all the tools and support around it(1). Flex and all the other stuff is on the server side (except for the client-side development tools and I doubt Macromedia is crying that they don't run on Linux).*
*ESPECIALLY with the attitude displayed on this forum towards Flash!
(1) A fact that applies to the Microsoft equation as well.
(2) Hypercosm uses a similiar idea applied to 3D. F/OSS has no equivalent.
I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm saying, "why bother?"
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
has anyone heard anything on when Adobe/Macromedia will fix the flash player audio issue on OSX (at least on Tiger) when using a external soundcard? it broke in ver8 and is still broken in ver9.
it still works fine using the built-in speakers or built-in line out.
the history of the world
Wow... just wow. Watch out, the programmers might kill you in your sleep. Submitting bug reports in SWF? WTF?
The future of Flash for web content? Hopefully, the future will be that it will D !!! I !!! E !!!
:) hahahaha
Thank heaven for Firefox and Flashblock. Now I can actually get around OK with my 128K ISDN connect. (I live in the sticks - my choices are ISDN, dialup that connects at 19.2K or satellite)
If Flash would die, and people selling shit on Ebay would bother compressing their pages full of half-megabyte friggin' JPEGs, the world would be a better place
Out of order? Fuck! Even in the future nothing works! - Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis) "Spaceballs"
Flash blocker usage has reached an all time high. Adobe better release Flash 9 soon or developers are going to stop using Flash altogether in order to provide a hassle free experience for their users.
When the players they make always lets me turn off a misbehaving Flash app. Nothing I love to see more than Flash Ads burning 95% of my CPU and 60% of my memory.
I'm probably not as anti-ad as the average /.er, but I draw the line at demanding the bulk of my computing resources in addition to desktop real-estate to advertise at me.
Little to no support for "most" OSes? You must mean "most" in the sense of "lots of tiny changes between different versions being different"
a sp
What it comes down to is that a)someone who's *GASP* NOT a programmer can use flash to create dynamic content, which to this day AJAX hasn't really made happen, and b) it IS supported on the MAJORITY of OSes, even though a wide variety make up the final 3.4% of the market.
There seems to be an ego among *nix fanboys that if there isn't a linux version it's not worth using...but really, that just means you haven't gotten off your ass and written one. Who's fault is that? Isn't that what makes linux so 733t[sarcasm]?
Flash holds the majority hand. You represent (with your "most" OSes) less than 4% of even POTENTIAL users, and most of those machines are un-manned servers. Realistically, they've let about 1.5-2% of the market go by not giving away a free plugin. I think they'll survive. And way to pull a FoxNews by saying "most OSes" when you know very well that you are in the vast minority. Misleading intentionaly to proove a point just means you're on the weaker side of the argument - and still a lier.
Source: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.
Blueberry Software's BB FlashBack - cost me $199.
mobile device applications
I must admit, I got excited when I first saw Flash Lite, the Flash 8 plugin that allows you to publish a Flash movie for a mobile device, but then I found out that it only publishes to the BREW framework, not J2ME, effectively ignoring the majority of phones out there (just about everything but Qualcomm), forcing developers to pay $400 for a developer license, and restricting distribution to the BREW network....yuck. Overall, given that I've just recently embarked on porting a game from Flash to mobile phone, it made so much more sense just to learn J2ME real quick (not really all that hard to do), rather than mess around with publishing a Flash game to BREW....
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
As someone coding an large scale application (hint, its part of a project that is costing billions of £) that is using Flex for the presentation layer (or presentation layer + as it is turning out to be), I have to disagree.
Flex (or Flash) is an API and can be made to develop complex applications. Though the question of "complex" is debatable. I think 10s of thousands of concurrent users with 10s of millions of daily transactions will be complex enough.
I've yet to see the Ajax app that performs to a high degree of accuracy to the same extent.
Server side execution of certain things? Sure, how do you want to go about it? RPC, WS, HTTP? These are obviously all wierd Adobe programming techniques that aren't used by millions of people across the planet. We're linked upto massive multiple clusters all running various Java servlets to perform all our server side needs, such as, for example working with that massive centralised DB.
Try looking at it from a security point of view as well. Flash is prone to fewer attacks. It is much harder to spoof a Flash application, you can't simply through up a look-a-like page, you can't use simple cross site scripting attacks, no SQL injection, simply fewer common techniques will stime it.
HTML is no greater universal than Flash, Flash has different players (which can be compensated for by directing the user to get the latest), HTML has all its IE/Firefox/Opera/etc problems.
In the end, Flash CAN be annoying, if simply used to create an annoying moving image... much like a gif can be annoying if used to create an annoying moving image, but it IS powerful and will only get more so.
I really believe that Macromedia might lose alot of its following to the Canvas tag once there's some software (fe. an "opensource webbased animation studio") to easily generate animations converted to Javascript in combination with the Canvas tag.
Wherever it'll be Macromedia themselves, or some individual...
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Does the evolution of flash over the past 10 years include the part there they turn their back on Linux?
Nope? I did not think so.
Nothing to see here, please move along.
"The thing about Flash is that many designers and artists use it to create pieces of art, animated or dynamic in form. For these people, Flash is used to a different end than what a typical commercial or information website might use it for, which in many cases amounts to abuse of Flash."
As an art form, I think Flash is great. But many of those sites that your link points to, although very beautiful to look at, are commercial site that do a horrible job at conveying information about the business. One more than one of those flash-enabled commercial sites, I had to sit through long animations just to get at a single sentence of information.
Look at it this way. If you were a business and were printing a dead-tree brochure, would you make the reader have to figure out a puzzle every time she wanted to turn the page? That's what browsing a flash-enabled site is like. Every link is a puzzle.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
Thankyou, thankyou. I'll be here all week.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
Flash brought us the two worst words on the Internet:
"Skip Intro"
http://www.osflash.org/red5
the other OSes are gaining in popularity, and quickly
.net)
you cant ignore a growing segment of the userbase for an entire industry just because your too lazy to support other platforms
especially when you consider your application its own platform!
thats just bad business
thats them making YOUR decision for you, they decided you would have to use windows, they decided your website visitors would have to use windows
i dont want anyone deciding for me what me and my customers have to run, which is THE REASON im using linux in the first place
i dont want to upgrade my computer according to someone elses corporate agenda (which is why i dont use windows)
i dont want to have to develop on a specific platform according to someone elses agenda, or because of someone elses laziness (which is why i wont develop in flash anymore, and have never touched VB, and have mostly avoided
i dont want to run a virus scanner, an adware scanner, a spyware scanner and a software firewall either to use my computer either..
windows sucks, it is losing popularity at a growing rate and will continue you to do so, the only thing keeping windows in the lime light is the fact that so many lazy 3rd party vendors just dont want to be bothered to support more than 1 platform and the companies strategies.
As more features get added in Flash, there will be more vectors that can be used to potentially infest computers with malicious software. As it is, using Flash as an application development platform is a bad idea because nobody tends to program for security, and decides on programming for performance for media players, webcam broadcasts, video streaming, etc. As more code gets added on, holes will open up, eventually. As is the future of any piece of software - there will be a crack, hack, hole, exploit, whatever for it.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I've never actually commented on an article here but this kinda burns me up so I feel the need to speak my mind. This is to the people ranting about negative points on Flash that they clearly know nothing about. Yes, a lot of people design their flash poorly, and it runs slow on older computers, and it does eat bandwidth. But what you need to realize is the potential for low bandwidth media rich content that flash is able to deliver, thanks to them agic of vector graphics. They look cleaner, animate smoother, can be scaled to any size without an increase in file size, and of course are far more efficient than bitmaps or other major image formats. The MP3 compression is especially impressive, enabling full songs to be streamed to dialup users with decent (not good, but decent) quality. Flash is also universally supported by Windows, Mac, and certain versions of linux. It is a universal platform in the sense that Java is for web use, and in my experience is much less resource-intensive than Java, because Java has always been very laggy for me. If you've had bad experiences with Flash, don't blame Flash, blame the developer that put it together, because they clearly skipped the part about learning how to make efficient swf files. Love it or hate it, Flash is here to stay, and is only going to become more popular. I do however have a problem with Adobe acquiring Macromedias line of products. I've never cared for Adobe products, and now they will probably end up adding all those little things I end up hating.
I'm using gnu/linux on amd64. There is no flash for that platform and even if there was, I don't want that proprietary wannabe-internet-standard thing. Nothing is more annoying than not being able to download a video that I can't even stream because Macro... ehrm Adobe doesn't see enough market opportunity in gnu/linux/amd64. I mean - at least offer both - the flash streaming thing AND the download.
Of course, in a ideal world, there'd be no flash at all.
Everytime you kill a kitten, god masturbates.
#189
<chernobyl> flash isn't going down. flash is putting java out of business
<chernobyl> how long has XML been around, and no one's moving to it
Works great on PPC as well, actually. Flash has been running smoothly on Mac for years.
Yes, it sucks that the linux support is so antiquated and there's no 64 bit support, I know.
Yahoo recently migrated all of their online games, which are immensely popular, over from Java to Flash. More and more websites are standardizing on Ajax for adding windowing-like functionality to web apps, rather than using Java (or even Flash) for interactivity - control widgets, info updating, form submissions, etc. It seems as though for more complex applications, Flash is leveraged; for less complex apps, or where graphics aren't critical, Ajax is the paradigm of choice. If Ajax continues to grow, watch for it to eventually overtake Flash entirely. Otherwise, it makes a handy replacement for browser-based Java Applets, which have always been error prone, leaked memory, etc (and, I consider myself pro-Java in most situations...).
nothing to see here.. move along
"A technology shouldn't be thrown away just because you don't like how some choose to use it."
Who here wants P2P to go away because it can be used to download legitimate material?
Exactly. And in my mind, this is the ONLY acceptable use for Flash. Google uses Flash in a couple of places (Video and Analytics, possibly others?). They've used it quite effectively, and only for things where it really is the best tool for the job. I see other sites every day that use Flash for their fucking navigation bars and splash screens. I don't even bother loading them, usually (I use the flashblock extension), I just leave the site. Flash is ugly and bloated and it fucks up navigation, so I just don't bother. Someone else can have my pageviews.
On top of all that, I use 64-bit Linux with 64-bit Firefox, so there's no Flash for me. I have to either launch my 32-bit copy of Firefox (which I keep around precisely for YouTube, Google Video and Analytics) or just wait until the next day and look at whatever I was going to look at from work.
The only reason that YouTube, Google Video et al adopted Flash as their video player client was because Flash is pretty much universal, and it's easier to convert videos into a Flash video file than to deal with all the compatibility issues that come with embedding a Windows Media / Quicktime / RealVideo file. Nothing wrong with that, because Flash was designed to be an animation / movie player, and moving to full motion video isn't that big of a step.
.NET or J2EE. As for ActionScript 2.0, its API is based on the ECMA Script standard and can be as "complex" as JavaScript. I don't think you want to get into ActionScript 3.0 either because that my friend is about as close as you're going to get to a strongly-typed OO language. And, let's disucuss your usage of the word "complex". That's a pretty relative descriptor, don't you think? Whose "yardstick" are you using anyway? I wrote a job tracking system in Flash/ActionScript 2.0 that plotted jobs in two-dimensional conical space based on latitude and longitude using very "complex" trigonometry.
.NET developer? Java developer? And, "limited" how? You have quite an arsenal at your disposal in terms of executing server-side code when using Flash with Flash Remoting. I agree, most people won't be able or be willing to cough up the coin for Flash Remoting but with Flex 2.0 most of that functionality is built-in. I will say if you choose to use some of the data components in Flash (e.g. Web Services Connector) you are somewhat limited and have to do some extra work to get the desired results.
Right. The ubiquity of the Flash Player does lend itself well to providing a single solution to play/stream video without having to worry about the type of media player the user installed.
What Flash is not is an API, at least not in terms of developing complex applications. The first thing wrong with that is that Flash itself is very closed compared to open HTML. Getting a screen-reader to work with Flash is a Herculean effort that I'm pretty sure nobody has yet accomplished.
Wrong. Flash has had an API since ActionScript 1.0, albeit less robust than
The second thing is that you're basically limited to working with Flash alone as your presentation layer. Want to do AJAX-like things? Sure, but you have to do it Adobe's way or not at all.
Wrong, and really just a bad argument. You are most certainly not limited to using Flash exclusively as your presentation layer. You can easily establish communication between HTML and Flash with Adobe's Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit. Now, I will agree there aren't many ways to do this communication but the Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit is the de facto standard. My question is, how else would you suggest doing it? Fortran and smoke signals? At least there is a standard way of accomplishing said communication.
Want to do AJAX-like things? Sure, but you have to do it Adobe's way or not at all.
Wrong. If you want to use a AJAX in your javascript you are definitely able to do so with the Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit I mentioned above. If you mean you can't do asynchronous XML requests from Flash, then you're mistaken again. You have the ability to load XML either synchronously or asynchronously with the XML object in ActionScript 3.0 and 2.0 (but in 2.0 you can't do it explicitly).
Want to have server-side execution of certain things? OK, but you have to go through Flash's weird ActionScript connection points and are limited to what Adobe has programmed into it.
Flawed reasoning, and here we go again with the relative terms. "Weird"? For whom? A PHP developer? C++ developer?
Flash is great for certain things, but for complicated web applications, stick with HTML. It's already universal, you won't have compatibility issues if written well, and you can keep your animations embedded. Just keep them separate from the rest of the page. Nothing annoys me more than a
When you get a real computer that can handle what 95% of the machines out there can.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
As a Coldfusion developer who's moving into the realm of Flex I couldn't agree more. RIA development using Flex is a joy compared to trying to develop something similar in Flash MX or even a typical AJAX environment. I had next to no experience coming into Flex and was amazed at how quickly I could get my applications up and running and talking to our database servers. What people don't seem to quite understand is that Flex is intended as a front-end development environment while back end processing is handled by CFCs (at least with a CF backend) or whatever back end solution your company is using. Since the player is cross platform there are no issues with javascript compatibility across browsers and when used tastefully it can be used to create some incredibly kick ass products. Check out ASFusion for some real world examples.
YouTube and Google videos are example of the right sort of usage of Flash. Other web sites which have 4 Flash adverts on the page or have the whole site in Flash advets aren't. I'm happy that that I have a P4, otherwise on my P3 based portable I see my CPU usage at near 90%. I use Flashblock in Firefox, not to block adverts but to block Flash, therefore a word to advertisers: PNG/GIF/JPEG/text adverts have more chance of capturing eyeballs than Flash.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Have you even USED it to develop complex applications? I suppose you hate Javascript as well.
Flash has incredible support for JavaScript, PHP, ColdFusion, XML, etc...
Your comment makes me think you have no idea of which you speak of.
An uneducated opinion about Flash? On Slashdot?? I am shocked and appalled. If I was wearing a monocle, it would be popping off as I write this.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Actually saying it is not an API is like saying it cannot be done. Fact is you can develop nearly any app you like in Flex using the Flash API's.
One of my favorite apps is an email client running ontop of jboss. My next favorite is a C64 emulator. Check it out > http://codeazur.com.br/stuff/fc64_final/ (note: it does require flash player 9)
Open Laszlo is a very slick, open source platform for writing Flash apps. They're also working on producing a DHTML/Ajax target for it -- write once, run with multiple runtimes.
Last, you're already starting to see the melding of Ajax and Flash.
Well, that doesn't happen for me, so my guess is you are running an inferior implementation on a less-popular OS.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
http://debugmode.com/wink/ Wink is sweet. Version 2.0 does audio, too. Huge time saver for demoing problems. Freeware, too. Plus, you can create EXEs for users who don't have Flash.
Come on, Adobe. How about PPC Linux flash?
Flash is not the end all and be all of web application creation. First of all, Flash runs client-side. Which means if you have a lot of things happening on the backend, you need a well interfaced method of handling commands in a pseudo stateless manner running on the server via web services or some other method. Additionally you will probably have to shift things onto the server anyway, since Flash's execution is so bloated that it will cripple low end machines.
Using Flash for a web application, even with Flex, is a stretch/hack of what Flash is built to do. Flash is a media client and thats how it performs best. Is it possible that it could change in the future? Sure. But at least at the moment, you'd be dumping a lot of development money into what is right now the wrong tool to do that sort of thing.
If a video producer uses stock components such as music or video, some of the stock providers charge several times more for the producer to let the public download the video than if the public can only stream the video. The definition of exclusive rights under U.S. copyright separates "reproduce and distribute" from "perform publicly", which tends to encourage such royalty structures.
Unless the Flash video phones home every time it plays, and it refuses to play if phoning home fails or if the user has not pulled an appropriate HTML page within 60 seconds before beginning to load the movie. You mention a Firefox extension, but such extensions do not support (and cannot support under US, EU, and Australian law) emulating such access controls.
That's why I uninstalled Adobe Reader in favor of Foxit Reader months ago. Foxit Reader is an application, and it doesn't try to install itself into Firefox as a Netscape plug-in. Firefox downloads the PDF, starts Foxit Reader, and continues to respond while Foxit Reader loads, even on my 5.5 year old PC with only 128 MB of RAM.
aa-aaahhhhh, saviour of the universe, da dum dah ...dum.....dum.....dum.....dum.....dum.....dum.... .dum..
oh sorry wrong flash.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
"the other OSes are gaining in popularity, and quickly"
/everyone/ and their dog is using Linux, and that thanks to the efforts of groups like Unbutu will finally bring Unix to the masses. To put the argument in your form, from the POV of the AVERAGE USER:
.net! That's short-sighted, and your elitist attitude and irrational MS hatred will keep you from getting good work in the future. You sure showed me.
"windows sucks, it is losing popularity at a growing rate and will continue you to do so..."
Really? Where do you get these numbers? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you pretty much pulled those out of the ether. Sadly, it isn't true. *nix adoption tapered off since January 2005, and has only grown by 0.2% in the last 18 months. Meanwhile Windows XP is at its highest rate ever, 74.3% - and its growth is somewhat slowed by the impending release of Windows Vista.
I know inside the Linux bubble it feels like
I upgrade my computer about every 2.8 years, so I don't really care about upgrading to someone's corporate agenda.
When I buy a computer it comes from Dell or HP, and has Windows already. The cost of Windows is part of the cost of a computer, like tires for a car.
I've always run (at least lately) virus scan, adware scan, and spyware scans. They are a part of life. I'm not going to sacrafice the ability to easily install and use software and having someone to gripe to when it doesn't work, in exchange for slightly fewer running processes. I don't even know what processes are.
I author Flash for a living. It's one of the few areas where the non-programming elite can rapidly author. Grumble that windows sucks all you want, I'm over here in the camp that's got ~88% of the market. That means that I have the deciding power, and I have the MASSIVE support networks when I want to do something. Horray, you don't author in
About as well as Flash does, given that Microsoft Internet Explorer joins scripting and plug-ins at the hip. But at least with an AJAX app it's usually easier to make a fallback that uses traditional page-loads.
In general to flash - spoiling websites for a decade now..
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
audio podcasts and radio shows. click and listen.
Welcome to Beatport
Beatport is the first blah blah blah...
PLEASE NOTE: Macromedia's Flash (version 8, or higher) is required to view this site.
Flash should be used where one needs to use Flash, and HTML/JS/CSS (+XML+XSLT) likewise.
Flash behaves consistently cross-browser, cross/platform -- and most features cannot be disabled by the user. (compare that to a user being able to turn off JS, or Java -- something often mandated in a corporate environment.) It's either "all on" or "all off." (w/ a few minor exceptions, eg: local storage and camera/mic access.)
Flash has a large install base. It's arguably the most widely available platform for delivering media-rich "applications" over the web.
Flash does not rely on anywhere near the number of kludges and workarounds necessary to replicate similar features -- where possible -- in different browsers and browser *versions.* (Unlike various browser technologies, supported features are more stable across updates of the Flash Player.)
Not to sound like I work for MM/Adobe, but, here's what the Flash Player can do at *run time*:
What a pile of shit. That site just points out what I can't stand about the misuse of flash and even ajax.
Why on earth make a navigation that breaks the back button?
There's a list of 30 links on the bottom of the page that could easily call something like index?page=2, but no, it has to do an oh-so-clever javascript call to replace the contents in a div tag. Brilliant.
So now when I'm on page 20, but I want to go back to page 19, I don't hit the browser's back button and just get my cached copy (that would be far too intuitive), I make another request to the site to fill the contents.
Are you buying? Where are affordable authoring tools? Or does Adobe expect everybody who wants to learn to author Flash to take unrelated courses at a community college so that they can qualify for an "educational" discount? AJAX takes just a text editor.
It's a shame "make the editor stop being a piece of shit that gets in your way all the time when you're trying to work, and occasionally corrupts your source files" never seems to be in their plans for the future. I gave up hope after they went out to various animation studios, asking for input on the UI, claiming that 8 would be 'focused on the animators again' - and when it came out, the editor's workflow was broken in EXACTLY the same way as 6 and 7 were. Yeah, you can put a blur on stuff now, whoopty-fucking-doo, it still takes about 4x as many mouse clicks and 10x as long (due to waiting for those extra clicks to register, and swearing when things go wrong) to do a simple piece of lipsynch as it did in 5.
I keep ending up with work that needs to be delivered as source files for this piece of this, too. Can't get away from it.
egypt urnash minimal art.
Which general-purpose graphical authoring tool for SWF applications is available as free software, freeware, or affordable shareware? I'm looking for something that is to Adobe's SWF authoring tool as GIMP or Paint.NET or Paint Shop Pro is to Photoshop. Does anything like that exist? Of the projects listed on osflash.org, which ones should I look at first?
I have used Flash since FutureSplash, but I must say as a Flash/ActionScript (10 years) and Director/Lingo (12 years) programmer that Flash plain sucks. Now Adobe wants to push Flash as an application development platform and I say good luck. The funny thing is I can code anything in Lingo twice as fast as possible than with ActionScript. Adobe seems to forget that they have a product that does this better (application development), despite being almost 3 years since Director's last major update. Flash runs like a dog on slower computers and like crap on OSX, Flash uses tremendous amounts of RAM and leaks like a stuck pig. Macromedia and now Adobe are making a huge mistake not bundling Shockwave with Flash, The Flash player at 1,324 K (Win) is about half the size of the slim Shockwave installer at 2,524 K (Win). Of course the Shockwave installer has the Flash (8) engine bundled with it and many more features, such as Shockwave 3D, support for more media types, and of course the ability to extend Shockwave via a long list of Xtras (specially wrapped libraries) that allow users in the browser or on the desktop to do things that Flash could never do with the current crop of Flash wrappers available. I've developed 2 - 14 player multiplayer 3D projected games in use at a major Florida theme park for one of the largest IT companies in the world, (think blue). They get 1200 players a day on average 365 days a year and to my knowledge over the last 5 years have not had a single problem. I built the game in 3 months and actually reprogrammed the entire game in the last 2 weeks to accomodate for playtesting results. Needless to say this could not be done in Flash. In 2001 I was contacted about the possibility of developing a custom window shaped multi-window IM community for a major brand. I explored using Jabber with Flash and found out that it just didn't work, instead I worked with the guys at Jabber.com to develop the first implementation of Jabber and Director by using the Jabber activex control and dll. I spent 1 hour and had a working proof of concept that blew the client away. I still have a demo online at http://contempt.net/vir-os/viros-demo.EXE if anyone cares to check it out. Despite my rant I do believe that Flash and Director together can lead to great things I just wish Adobe would not push Flash as their desktop application development platform of choice. -b
I do the same thing with powerpoint. anything special about doing it with flash?
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
I just have to remark that one of the websites linked on that page, http://www.2advanced.com/ -- is the most astounding and complete piece of flash work I have ever seen on the web. Seriously. I'm floored.
Am I a hipster-doofus?
Many sites, such as Google Video and YouTube, continue to target Flash 7, despite supposed video compression improvements in 8 and 9. Flash 7 was the last version released for Linux, which may have something to do with it. If that's the reason, then Adobe/Macromedia's years of foot-dragging on Linux support has already hurt them in measurable ways, slowing adoption of their newer releases.
My point was that until Linux can adapt things properly, it sucks too.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Mod parent up.
Seriously, the grandparent is trying to argue that Flash is more accessible than plain text and HTML. Hint: Making it easy for the *page author* to implement screen reader does not make a site more accessible. Accessibility goes far beyond screen readers. With HTML the content is accessible to the user to do as they wish.
This makes the content more *usable*. I can use Greasemonkey to modify the page. I can use Piggy-bank (http://simile.mit.edu/piggy-bank/) to extract content. I can parse the page with various tools (BeautifulSoup, ElementTree, perl... etc.) I can make my own screen reader that behaves exactly like a want. In fact I can make any arbitrary application on top of the data provided by the page. I do not need to rely on the web page author.
Using accessible formats enables users to *build* applications using web pages as *data*.
Flash doesn't let you do these things. Flash is a hinderance to the next 'evolution' of the web (semantic web).
The site looks interesting! But my computer won't play the animations. It says "please download the Flash 8 plugin from here [macromedia]", but when I do, that site tells me there is no plugin available for my computer. It's an ordinary Linux laptop, with Firefox.
The Story of Mel
Maybe this is buried in someone else's comment, but I don't feel like checking if it's already posted.
Flash makes your browser very vulnerable to attack. Do you really want to allow any arbitrary website the ability to scan your internal network, and send arbitrary requests to whatever ports are open? Amit Klein's recent work is eye-opening:
http://securityreason.com/securityalert/1294
Similar attacks in other client-side technologies are much less effective (though sometimes still possible).
#Commercial interruption!#
Flash also makes books(1) like this potentially available across platforms.*
*If you ever played with the software, you'll know what I mean.
(1) Note the bigger problem has nothing to do with technology.
"If you don't close your mind to the possibilities, Flash is an incredible development tool and let's my company do things that would not be possible with any other technology."
I use it (amoung other places. e.g. education) in my GUI research.
#We now return you to flash-bashing, already in progress#
Version 7 is a couple years old, and version 9 of the player is definitely out. However, the Flash IDE is only on version 8 - so _nothing_ in production requires player 9 yet.
verison 7 of the IDE was "Flash MX 2004" - because it came out in 2004. version 8 of the IDE only came out in 2006. So right now Linux can't play things created with the 2006 version that didn't develop with any backward compatibility.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
I used to loathe Flash, simply because the use it was put to was not very good. I think there should be a special circle in hell for website developers that bury plain old text content in flash files.
However, I recently started building a web app. I researched different approaches such as AJAX and OpenLaslzo. Then on a whim I downloaded the Flex Builder 2 beta and played with it. I've been completely blown away by it. It's a pretty cool environment and approach. It's not just a development environment hacked on top of Flash, it's a very solid development environment that builds very coherent applications. That data binding is pretty amazing all by itself.
I'm having loads more fun developing in it than I ever had doing anything web related. And i get something that looks good instead right out of the box instead of spending hours polishing the CSS turd.
Yeah me too. NOT! Here's what I see:
http://voidmain.is-a-geek.net/i/2advanced.png
-Void
Awesome! Some of them manage to take less than 20 seconds to load! What an improvement! Not to mention that most take half the time when I click a link. What a concept. And thy're more than happy to play their crappy music over whatever I'm listening. I for one welcome our web 3.0 overlords.
They are alienating what's left of the market share.... That's not smart business.
(Unfortunately that doesn't mean Linux is actually any better, though.)
(But it does mean that corporations fighting each other -- Microsoft Vs. Adobe -- hurt the consumer. Capitalism is supposed to have competition helping the consumer, but clearly this isn't what is happening here...)
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
There have only been two new versions of Flash since 7. We're at 9 now. During the beta stages, Flash Player 9 was called 8.5, but it's still the same player. The latest version of Flash works on both Windows and OSX (not "only on one"). The version for Intel Macs is in beta right now. The Linux version is currently in development. I will concede that the current Linux Flash player only works on x86, and as far as I know, version 9 will be the same. Likewise, 64-bit support will not be there yet either. Hopefully they'll consider additional architectures in the future.
You didn't mention it, but I'd like to clear up one other misconception that many Linux users have. Unfortunately, Flash 8 never came out for Linux. Why? Adobe decided to scrap it and go straight to Flash 9. They determined that fixing the issues in Flash 7 and adding support for the new features of Flash 8 would actually take longer than doing a clean port of the Flash 9 player. The Flash 9 code was written with operating systems other than Windows and Mac in mind, so it would be an easier port than previous versions.
It's scary being a Flash and Flex developer on Slashdot. You guys are unnaturally rabid.
Where is my 64 bit version of flash? Where are the development tools for flash on a linux box?
And it's because there is no flash player v8 for Linux!! Flash sucks!!!! All web designers that use it should be executed!!
-Void
No, they are not. They are textbook examples of the wrong use of Flash. The correct way to implement such functionality is:
<object data="/path/to/movie.mpg"/>
etc.
...orgasming over the thought of another opportunity to bash Flash
Another app linux morons love to hate.
Seriously. You idiots (the Microsoft loathing, Adobe hating, uber-morons) have no life.
...oh wait, it's not. I guess all the rest is pretty moot, then.
I have found that a Flash website is like a bunch of un-related words
in an email message - it's an indicator of "I am crap".
I don't load a Flash renderer intentionally. It saves me so much time
(and soon, so many exploits) to simply Say No.
Why people *bother* with Flash is... beyond me. Possibly it's because
they like watching pretty lights.
"Flash -- How to hide that you don't have anything of Substance"
You should check out Adobe Flex. It's a great application development framework that provides much of the functionality you're looking for. In the end, it's component system probably makes building complicated web applications easier than HTML because you don't have as much testing for compatibility across platforms. Plus, you can use MXML for layout (which should be pretty familiar for HTML users).
The latest version (Flex 2) is based on Flash 9, and it provides all sorts of new ways to connect to other sources. You can talk to Javascript on the webpage with ExternalInterface (if you're looking to use some of that AJAX functionality), there's the XML connections from previous versions, and Flash 9 adds a binary socket system. It has already been used to implement SMTP, POP3, AOL Instant Messenger, Telnet, and VNC protocols. It should be able to connect to just about anything.
I've seen screen readers working pretty well with Flex 2. There's still a bit of testing involved, but it's not much different than normal desktop applications.
It's scary being a Flash and Flex developer on Slashdot. You guys are unnaturally rabid.
I asked a Macromedia/Adobe Flash Evangelist recently why they have not yet implemented a toggle for flash like the Firefox Extension, so that users could chose to turn flash on for one page and off for another (or possibly even more granular if you wished). He told me flat out "because then our customers wouldn't like it because it would be too easy for you to avoid their ads. We want you to have a "one or the other" choice -- either all Flash or none. We think the quality of good/userful/entertaining flash out there is what makes Flash an attractive advertizing platform. If you could pick and choose what you saw, Flash would be just another rich media option on the web."
I found his honesty refreshing. And I see his point -- if you could easily pick and chose flash (as I do with the FF Flashblock extension) you'd probably never see a flash ad. I was surfing on a friends computer (on IE even) and his web experience SUCKS. Flash ads everywhere, they make noise without permission, they are ...ummm...FLASHY. And irritating. I honestly don't know how people get around with flash enabled all the time. For me if the choice is as he put it -- either no flash, or flash with no control over it, I'll take no flash.
It's silly for us to get into the arguement over whether or not content on the web should be free or supported by advertisments, because neither of us will affect the other's opinion. I don't block every ad, but if one annoys me, I do block it. I think the ad companies have the right to try to show me ads, and I have the right to try to block the ones that annoy me. So for me, I'll never consider flash an option until users have the ability to selectively choose what pages are allowed to run flash, and which flash apps are allowed to run on a given page.
Also for everyone in my company, because I block .swf at the router
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
Learn it.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
your damn right authoring in .net is shortsighted ;)
.net type of stuff why not use java? java is very similar to c# and is also cross platform
.NET is all the rage now) but just like all of those techs .net is sure to fade into obscurity and non-use as soon as MS comes out with the 'next big thing' and hypes it at the expense of everything else, then developers are expected to run out and learn this new shit, get recertified, pay more money for all of this crap..
.net i got into Qt, GTK+, OpenGL and SDL, which are all crossplatform opensource(or at least openly documented) platforms that have been around for some time, and will likely continue to be around for quite a while longer
lately ive been developing with Qt, which is crossplatform. it works great on windows and linux and whatever else you might want to try it on (we release 32 and 64 bit versions of our product on windows, linux, solaris and irix, all from one codebase)
also if your going to do
if your in love with flash you should at least be aware that if you are using higher than version 7 your cutting out potential visitors/customers
i used to program directly in win32 api, and in MFC, and have done COM/OLE/ActiveX, all of these old technologies dont really have much of a place in todays IT world, (winAPI is too low level, MFC is old, and
instead of getting into
meanwhile on the webdev front there is alot going on with ajax and vector based stuff which im not really an expert on, but im guessing if flash doesnt take up the slack, other alternatives will
This would imply that it is honestly cross-platform.
It is NOT.
There's no 64-bit version for Linux or Windows- won't be for some time to come.
There's no latest version for Linux or anything other than Windows or MacOS.
That doesn't meet the criteria for cross-platform or consistent behavior any better than Java or
I mean, Java has better consistency for apps than Flash does right now.
Mono has better consistency for apps than Flash does right now.
Both of those sit on pretty much everything. But, would I be doing applications against them for
Web stuff? No. Why would Flash, which is only consistent within Windows, really, be any different.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Geez. It's not Java, nor is it a Java work alike or an app solution- it's NOT cross-platform, it's not supported solidly past Windows.
No wonder that they're not out with the Linux or MacOS x86 versions- or even a 64-bit version for any OS. They're frittering time
away trying to make another Java out of it.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Flash has only three purposes on the web today:
Apparently the development tools still have the same problems they did when I toyed with Flash 4 and 5: horrible and intrusive UI, memory glutton, general instability. After 5 years they can't fix that?
Then the output plagues users with horrible usability, non-existent accessibility, produced by a horde of developers/designers who generally don't know squat about good interface design. What does it take to make a form in Flash let me tab through the inputs instead of clicking on each one and hoping it gets focused?
IMO, 85% of what Flash is usesd for is possible in web standards. The other 15% boils down to audio, and IE's crappy standards support. In the future, the portion of what you don't need Flash for can only grow as SVG, the canvas element, CSS3, and proper PNG support in IE arrive.
Which leaves audio in websites. I don't see why audio couldn't be applied to a page via CSS. Background music? body {sound-file: url(some_audio_file.mp3); loop: forever /* otherwise, an int */; }
. Button press? input[type=button]:click {sound-file: url(button_noise.ogg); loop: 0; }. Control it just like you would everything else on the page: Javascript + DOM.
Flash really is a solution looking for a problem. I was hoping that Adobe would kill flash, or turn it into a tool to develop with open standards as outlined above. Oh, well... I guess IE can't be the only thing I hate about the internet.
no SQL injection
um, that's a server-side problem. The fact that the data is input through Flash doesn't change it one whit.
In case you haven't seen penguin.swf.
I'll just uhh, stand by the side lines in total support.. Don't worry, I have flags and everything, surly that's be enough encouragement!
Sorry, no. You'll need to be a female with big boobs, too.
The only thing I like about flash these days is videos embeded in webpages (as opposed to embedding a QuickTime, Real, Windows Media file)
and why the hell won't they release the latest version of Flash for Linux? I'm sick of crapy Flash 7 that doesn't work.
...and we all know you run IE on your alternative platform (not supported by flash).
Perhaps someone should tell YouTube to use AJAX. After all it's just as good as Flash and everyone implements graceful fallbacks in AJAX when JS is disabled.
Wrong. Flash has had an API since ActionScript 1.0, albeit less robust than .NET or J2EE. As for ActionScript 2.0, its API is based on the ECMA Script standard and can be as "complex" as JavaScript. I don't think you want to get into ActionScript 3.0 either because that my friend is about as close as you're going to get to a strongly-typed OO language. And, let's disucuss your usage of the word "complex". That's a pretty relative descriptor, don't you think? Whose "yardstick" are you using anyway? I wrote a job tracking system in Flash/ActionScript 2.0 that plotted jobs in two-dimensional conical space based on latitude and longitude using very "complex" trigonometry.
.NET developer? Java developer? And, "limited" how? You have quite an arsenal at your disposal in terms of executing server-side code when using Flash with Flash Remoting. I agree, most people won't be able or be willing to cough up the coin for Flash Remoting but with Flex 2.0 most of that functionality is built-in. I will say if you choose to use some of the data components in Flash (e.g. Web Services Connector) you are somewhat limited and have to do some extra work to get the desired results.
I agree that my wording was a bit ambiguous. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that by "complex" I mean a session-based web application running, say, an online store. Your argument as to your graph-plotting application is a good use for Flash, because it's mostly vector graphics with some calculation in the backend. However, when it comes to managing multipage applications like the one I mentioned, I believe it's much better to stick with HTML as it doesn't fall prey to the issues I described earlier.
Wrong, and really just a bad argument. You are most certainly not limited to using Flash exclusively as your presentation layer. You can easily establish communication between HTML and Flash with Adobe's Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit. Now, I will agree there aren't many ways to do this communication but the Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit is the de facto standard. My question is, how else would you suggest doing it? Fortran and smoke signals? At least there is a standard way of accomplishing said communication.
You're ignoring my original argument: That there is only one real way to do it. Once again, you're stuck with Adobe or nothing. As to using Flash as your exclusive presentation layer, I concede. I did not know about this integration kit. (Though why you'd want to complicate things by having one client-side component talking to another, I do not know.)
Flawed reasoning, and here we go again with the relative terms. "Weird"? For whom? A PHP developer? C++ developer?
Weird from my perspective personally. But fine, let's take the word "weird" out of my argument. I argue that you are limited to what Adobe lets you do. Funny how you mention that you'd have to purchase another product to obtain that functionality in pure Flash. Not only are you limited by the ActionScript itself, you're limited by the license you'd have to purchse in order to use said functionality.
Wrong. HTML is universal? Have you heard of the browsers Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera? Yes, they all render HTML but the result can be and usually is very different between them.
Only if you use bad / proprietary extensions in your HTML, which can easily be avoided by sticking to standards like XHTML. The only real exception is IE, but even then it's just a case of working around its bugs, and those only come up if you're trying to do some pretty advanced things. And yes, HTML is universal. Coded correctly, it's readable in a major browser, a screen-reader, or even a text-mode browser like Links. Try doing that in Flash and tell me how far you get. Also, as I've mentioned elsewhere, there's still no Flash Player 9 for Linux. Adobe says there will be one soon but Linux users are at their mercy until then.
I really think you should investigate Flash more thoroughly before using your "jump to conclusions" mat and making arguments you can't back up.
Consider my arguments backed up.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I removed Flash from my system - because the Flash advetisements on so many sites are just far too annoying. I'm willing to dump Flash, because life is so much better with out Flash advertisments. Maybe Firefox needs a "block Flash from this server" option, just like it has for images?
http://www.fat-pie.com/
...here
.NET.
Microsoft has Adobe very firmly in it's sight. It is bringing out technology to compete with Adobe. XAML is Microsoft's silver bullet for Flash. Vista and all future releases of Windows will include support for XAML, support for legacy window systems will be facilitated via service packs.
XAML will have all the features of Flash, including tools for graphical designers plus the power and ease of development of Visual Studio
If this doesn't bite hard into Adobe's market over the next 2-3 years I would be very surprised. I think Adobe is currently riding at it's peak right now, I see only a downhill path for them from here.
I'm hoping its future involves a grave.
meh
Adobe Flash can also handle results from a web service (WSDL, SOAP, XML). If the native web service communication mechanism isn't good enough for you, you can boost your communication speed with Adobe's proprietary binary found in Flash Remoting MX. For example, you could use a .NET 2.0 web service for the "heavy lifting" and then the finished results are displayed in the Adobe Flash front end, thus giving you the best of both worlds.
Also, I do like the fact that many websites that use Adobe Flash can be viewed on the Sony PSP thanks to the native Flash 6 support in the 2.70 firmware update. Finally Actionscript 2.0 (I haven't tried version 3 yet) is modeled closely after EMCA-262.
Adobe Flash isn't the solution to everything, but for a web presentation technology component, IMHO, it is unmatched.
Just because you get modded "insightful" on Slashdot doesn't mean you actually are in real life.
Pandora.com is one of my favorite web pages, so is youtube. I endured years of buggy and poorly-performing embeddings of quicktime, realmedia, and windows media, and I'm glad to see them falling by the wayside as flash rises to prominance.
Each web site that hosted videos had their own "player." It was always poorly designed, and usually so bad that I found it less of a hassle to disable plugins and view the source to get the video in an external player.
Flash doesn't seem to have that problem, but it doesn't seem to have an alternative to its plug-in form, either.
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
is more web pages that I don't want to visit, and in the toilent.. It doesn't work all that well. It's hardly ubiquitious. Linux/MacOS/BE/BSD/? 'support for flash is spotty at best.
I've always known Flash could offer a richer development platform and UI than anything Java, Ajax etc in terms of browser based or stand alone web based applications. Seriously, most of you naysayers have an itch against Flash because of its current basic use for annoying ads. Its so much more powerful than that. Its laughable when I see what folks are trying to do with Ajax. Things that can so simply be done with Flash and work "smoothly". Some of the client/server apps I see done with Java. Pure crap, and on top of that java apps can be so fricking annoyingly slow. Its amazing how open source nuts can praise crap for so long. Utterly amazing.
I've known folks who work for major companies pouring tons of money into java applications only to end up with SLOW crap. Amazing.
Flex will show its muscle. Its already doing that and most of you dont even realize it. Google and Yahoo are utilizing Flash in more ways than you realize.
The rest of us will move on to more refined platforms for developing "true" network centric rich web based or non web based applications. Java is so overhyped. Building java apps and making them cross platform what a bitch. And the speed of java, ugh. Pure kludge. Flex is an exciting platform with many posssibilities. Google and Yahoo are already utilizing them, NOT java. Heck even C# is better than java.
The big iron 1970's are over fellas. Dont be afraid to step out of the cave.
You were hallucinating. Using the Flash specification for anything other than creating authoring tools has always been forbidden.
It's Macromedia that is hallucinating. The history of "plug-compatible" devices implementing rival implementations of a published specification dates back to the start of the computer industry, and has thousands of precedents.
Ideally, ignore Flash altogether. But if you can't ignore Flash, then at least ignore its entirely illegal anti-competition license.
Will be the same as it is now. That is, seeing the "Flashblock" icon that my favourite extension in Firefox adds to web pages in order to save me from the craptacular, useless, and intrusive annoyances that compose about 95% of the instances where a developer has made the unfortunate and foolish decision to include Flash on a web page.
Hey, do you have any recommendations on how to learn Flex and start making RIA's with Flash? What software tools are most useful? Thanks!
Let me respond to each of your points, since every other post seems to respond to only one or two:
Flash does behave consistently, where it works. It is not cross-platform, mainly because it's not open. FYI, cross-platform does NOT mean "Windows and Mac". Old versions of Flash work on Linux, and there only on x86 -- Linux runs on many more platforms. And there's more than just Linux that people like to browse from -- pocket devices, Solaris/BSD, and so on.
Being able to turn off components without turning off the whole thing is nice -- I can disable audio, for instance, and not download any sound files at all, but still see some JavaScript animations. Besides, if you look at your list -- you can disable all of Java, or none of it, you can't go halfway. Gee, Java sounds just like Flash, doesn't it? But Java is actually much more cross-platform, and may open up in the future.
Large install base gets you NOWHERE here. IE has a large install base. It's also a steaming pile of shit that everyone who develops for the Web wishes would just go the fuck away. Flash has a large install base, but guess what? It's also a steaming pile of shit that many who develop for and browse the web wishes would just go the fuck away.
Kludges and workarounds... hmm. I call having to install an x86 version of Firefox on amd64 a "kludge". It'll be even more of a kludge to do that under qemu on my Powerbook. But anyway, what about multiple versions of Flash? Keep in mind that the latest flash isn't available everywhere...
And if you don't want kludges and workarounds, use something like Dojo, where everyone else has already thought of the kludges and workarounds and done them for you. That's what Flash does for you in this case, by the way -- they thought of the kludges and workarounds and implemented them, so you don't have to think about it.
Normal embedded mp3 audio can be loaded and played externally. Flash is just duplicating an existing browser tech here.
Video can also be embedded. Flash just makes it annoyingly more difficult to save said video, or to run it fullscreen. It also is orders of magnitude slower than a real video player -- QuickTime, Windows Media Player, VLC, mplayer, any of those. It's the desire to simply stream a video and watch it fullscreen, with nice anti-aliasing, that makes me positively hate the use of Flash in YouTube.
Are you trolling, or do you have a clue? Custom, pre-packaged fonts have been available for browsers for a long time. Not standard, maybe, but you didn't specify that. Plus, I can actually cut'n'paste properly out of something in one of those custom fonts.
Browsers can load/parse/serialize XML. In fact, if you're using standard XHTML, that's what they do all day. Do you not know what AJAX means?
Browsers can POST and GET anything they damn well please. It's called HTML forms. Want to do it automagically? Use it in a hidden frame.
Webcams? Got me. So you're ruining the Internet so that a web page can access my webcam? What the fuck? Just make webcams the domain of normal IM software. Seriously, web pages do NOT need to be doing this, and why do we need to make our own video/IM app?
JavaScript+SVG can programmatically do all that wonderful vector stuff. Since the browser's doing it, it's even conceivable that it could use OpenGL to make it actually, y'know, fast.
Version 8 doesn't run on Linux, but even if it did, why do I care? I can composite PNGs and SVG, at the very least. The rest, I'm not positive about, but I'm pretty damned sure it can be done.
File upload: Got me there. But, two things: 1) Zipfiles. 2) If you're uploading tons of stuff anyway, maybe the browser isn't the right place to do it? Also, why do I need programmatic access to the state of the upload? Why does every Flash app in the world have to have a different progress bar?
JavaScript can animate stuff!!! GIFs are animated too!!!! OMFG, welcome to 1999!!!!!!
Flash is
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Flash is killing the original open-source nature of the Web, taking otherwise fully readable sites and pages and hiding them behind a veil of proprietary secrecy. It's analogous to what DRM is doing in other aspects.
I find it laughable that people are having wild hand-wringing fits over so-called "'Net neutrality" while Flash and a few other technologies have been busy for years destroying the very fabric of what was once called the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is almost dead: welcome to the Corporate Web.
This is old, but I just read your reply.
I think you should check again, though. The only pointers in ActionScript (2.0 or 3.0) are MOUSE POINTERS. There is NEVER going to be pointers in ActionScript. We're talking about an interpreted language that uses Garbage Collection. Why would you ever want a pointer? You can implement a linked list with REFERENCES, you don't need pointers.
Do you understand that pointers (in C) address a block of memory? Why would you ever address a block of memory in a high-level language like ECMA Script? It just doesn't make sense.
Maybe you meant references, but pointers are way different then references.
That's good then. There was me thinking that this was exactly what AJAX was.
That is the point the gp was trying to make as well. Flash and AJAX do the same thing. Flash just requires a plug-in to do it.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious