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iPlayer Released for Mac, Linux; Adobe Announces AIR for Linux
Zoxed writes "The BBC reports that their iPlayer has just been released for Mac and Linux (download page). It is based on Adobe Air, but unfortunately the service is only available to UK IP address, so I can not test it out from my adopted homeland of Germany. Perhaps a UK-based Slashdotter could review it?" In related news, an anonymous reader writes "Adobe has announced a Linux version of its AIR 1.5 runtime environment that is supposed to allow rich web apps developed on it to run on Fedora Core 8, Ubuntu 7.10 and openSuse 10.3 with no modification. The company released versions for Windows and Mac OS X back in November."
Isn't this release just in time for support of those 2 versions to be discontinued?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Lots. The advantage the Flash Player has over Javascript, CSS and DHTML is the when I code something for the Flash Player I know what my 1 single target platform is. When I code for the browser I'm coding for x number of subtly incompatible targets. Yes, libraries can abstract away that to a degree but not wit the ease of (the admittedly closed source) Flpash Player. Plus the player has lots of bells and whistles that frankly are really nice to use.
Puzzle Daze is now my job
no, i just thought that after that many years here I should have at least on first post :)
I am on the Adobe Pre-release program and I've been testing AIR Linux since it was in engdrop form, it's never installed on Slackware or Sabayon. When will they release a version that will install across all distros? Nobody knows.
Wow, a low uid making a first post comment. Was the account hacked?
This is slashdot.
There are trolls.
Same as it ever was.
I'm glad all the whining us Linux fans are doing is paying off. Everybody's jumping on the Linux-supporting bandwagon, if only to stop us from telling all our friends and relatives and strangers that $COMPANY are a bunch of evil meanie heads.
Additionally, Air and Flash have some hefty licensing restrictions. From Adobe:
For the avoidance of doubt, and by example only, Distributor shall not distribute any Adobe Runtime for use on any (a) mobile device, set top box (STB), handheld, phone, web pad, tablet or Tablet PC (other than Windows XP Tablet PC Edition and its successors), game console, TV, DVD player, media center (other than Windows XP Media Center Edition and its successors), electronic billboard or other digital signage, internet appliance or other internet-connected device, PDA, medical device, ATM, telematic device, gaming machine, home automation system, kiosk, remote control device, or any other consumer electronics device, (b) operator-based mobile, cable, satellite, or television system or (c) other closed system device. For information on licensing Adobe Runtimes for use or distribution on devices see http://www.adobe.com/licensing.
So, they can call it "free" all they want, but it isn't even free-as-in-beer free.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Actionscript 3.0 is really a pretty decent language, on par with the newest versions of javascript... and DHTML/CSS doesn't come close to the power of the flash graphics API. A decent flash game, for instance, can look & play better than most Super Nintendo games; DHTML/Javascript is still pushing hard to look like an original NES. Both, of course, are hundreds of times slower than native applications.
Flash has its problems, obviously; it breaks the whole browsing paradigm. However, there's just nothing else out there right now with the same mix of capabilities; it has its niche. (Maybe java applets, but those universally suck. Maybe Silverlight could, but nobody seriously uses it.)
http://samair.ru/proxy/
Even on windows I have seen flash sites tell me that I need to upgrade flash to (say) version 9 because I was already running version 10.
Thats what happens when you get teenagers to do your configuration management.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Same as it ever was.
And you may find yourself
In a news website for nerds
Fighting the first post trolls
And you may find yourself
Wondering "why, in God's name, am I here?"
And the days go by...
Streaming works fine over proxy; currently watching Apparitions
Oh, really?
Sorry to pick on you, but this is a bugbear of mine.
Applications written in AIR/Silverlight/whatever are not web applications. They're thick client applications that happen to use a bit of http and javascript.
Web applications run in web browsers. Not in one particular browser, and not in a third party runtime.
I'm glad AIR was a good fit for your problem.
[*mumbles under his breath and waves cane threateningly*]
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Who is paying £1,000 for a TV licence? It's £139.50, dumb ass.
I've installed AIR and the iPlayer downloader, and so far neither have really worked.
Granted this is probably because I'm using 64-bit Linux, and they don't seem to support it yet (not that I was told this at any stage of the installation process, or the website where I downloaded the installer.
To get the thing installed on 64-bit I followed these instructions, and then proceeded to the BBC website to download something. Nothing seemed to work, no download links appeared. I then followed the links to an episode of Never Mind The Buzzcocks that other people reported was working. This time a download link appeared, but clicking it took me to install the program again.
To figure out why it wasn't working, I ran the downloader from the command line. It was printing the following: "Unkown desktop manager((null)), only Gnome and KDE are supported". Aha... I'm using XFCE, yet it must use the inter-process communication of either one of those desktops...
Booted into Gnome, and tried again. This time it tells me that it wants libgnome-keyring.so - I realise that no preferences are savable - it must be saving prefs with the keyring. I think that's a bit odd - what's wrong with ~/.Adobe/AIR?
After installing 32-bit libraries for gnome-keyring, the thing still doesn't work, and still won't download anything.
The problem with this application, or rather with Adobe AIR, is the series of arbitrary choices the designers seem to have made. Linux is not a platform where you can assume many things - and it would have probably made more sense to pick some generic ways of getting things done (there's a reason that text-files have always been used for config!) rather than relying upon fairly specific libraries for basic tasks and then not even falling back to a sane alternative. Perhaps a 64-bit version will fix all of this, I certainly hope so!
Joseph Farthing
http://josephfarthing.com