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Adobe Opens the FLV and SWF Formats
Wolfcat writes to tell us that Adobe announced today that they are opening the SWF and FLV formats via the Open Screen Project. "The Open Screen Project is supported by technology leaders, including Adobe, ARM, Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco, Intel, LG Electronics Inc., Marvell, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Verizon Wireless, and leading content providers, including BBC, MTV Networks, and NBC Universal, who want to deliver rich Web and video experiences, live and on-demand across a variety of devices. The Open Screen Project is working to enable a consistent runtime environment — taking advantage of Adobe Flash Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR — that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and consumer devices, including phones, mobile internet devices (MIDs), and set top boxes."
IIRC, Macromedia's original rationale for keeping the formats secret was to prevent a certain unnamed competitor from embracing and extending them. Presumably they're counting on Microsoft being so committed to Silverlight that they're not going to turn on a dime, ditch their system (which their people believe, with some justification, to be technically superior) and replace it with a bastardisation of Flash.
No way, they know exactly why they made it, and they do in fact need it very badly.
Flex + Flash's ubiquity + Adobe Air = obviated operating system. It doesn't matter what OS you run if you can create a single application which runs on mobile phones, from a web browser on all major OS's, or as a desktop application on all major OS's.
It's quick and easy to create a single application which runs just about anywhere - much simpler than creating a standard desktop application. So as a developer, as long as you don't need something high-end enough to rule out Flex as a platform (ie, 3d games, etc), there's really very little reason to not currently be developing for Flex.
Microsoft knows this, Flash crept up on them and turned into a serious threat to their monopoly. They're probably really kicking themselves for having distributed it for a while, cinching the install base.
Silverlight is Microsoft's knee-jerk reaction to the realization that this sleeping giant is waking up. It's their attempt to maintain the lock-in they currently own. This is why they're now shoving Silverlight down your throat. For example, my Microsoft Office 2008 on OS X had a "Critical Update," whose description was vague, and did not contain a link to the full details. Installing it because of course that's what you do with critical updates, it turns out to have simply been an install of Silverlight, even though there was no way for me to have known this in advance.
I went to a Silverlight developer conference, and I saw Microsoft employees showing off example applications, including walking us through the creation of these applications. I can say without a doubt that Flex is substantially easier to work with; in the time and lines of code they created a simple slideshow with fading transitions that reads filenames out of a CSV, at the Adobe conference, they'd made a slideshow with thumbnails, transitions, varying timers, pause, manual navigation, and even a carousel mode, which read data from a CSV, SOAP, WSDL, or REST web service.
Like many things, Microsoft is putting just enough effort into Silverlight to make it look competitive.
FWIW, I asked during the Silverlight developer conference a few months ago what the current install base of Silverlight was, and the only response they were willing to give is, "If you don't use it, nobody will install it." That means practically nobody.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
As I have asked elsewhere (without reply) what about patents, and codecs. The format is all nice and stuff but IIRC flash uses the VP6 & VP7 codecs from On2. On2 is not really all that open with its IP as the ffmpeg group found out (IIRC). Its like having a open avi format but you still have to pay for the codecs that we use.
Adobe IMO has a good reputation (ps and pdf). But there nothing about this i can find on the website. I really would like some more information about the IP issues. Without a clear statment about the IP involved it will be difficult to implement a true GPL 3 version at the least.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
So then can you clear up the IP issues with On2 VP6 and mpeg codecs that are used in the players? Does "free" mean that we all have a unrecoverable license to use these codecs (that means all the patents that are claimed over these codecs as well) with flash? Or does free just mean Adobe part of the license fees are waived?
Example: can I use flash (mpeg/VP6) as the movie format without paying license fees in a commercial video game? Note that no GPL code could be used of course.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
The slow implementations you're talking about are due to the retarded programming of the game authors. Most people in Flash come from a designer background and not a programming background, hence inefficient code. as for implementations of Flash getting faster and faster, the demo of Flash 10 they showed at Adobe Max was fast enough to run Quake 1 in fullscreen! Check the 2nd video in the link below from sneak peeks at Adobe Max in Chicago last year: http://www.peterelst.com/blog/2007/10/03/adobe-max-chicago-sneak-peeks/
http://www.object404.com