I don't think LaunchCast is what I'm talking about. LaunchCast seems to be a streaming music service (similar to the Radio section of iTunes, as well as a wide variety of streaming services). Its main innovation seems to be that it can create custom radio stations for you based on your preferences. One reason that Podcasts are mostly talk-radio shows is the lack of a royalty license agreements similar to what commercial radio has. This is something that would be very difficult to set up with traditional Podcasts because they are in the MP3 format, and there's nothing to prevent a song that was "broadcast" from being easily saved with no degredation.
The reason I was thinking about Music broadcasts is because when I'm on the go - listening to my iPod. Sometimes I really like having the Podcasts on there - they're like short little NPR vignettes in between the music. Often, however, I am wanting to listen to music, and the talk segments are annoying and instantly skipped over. I'm looking for DJs to make "music radio" for me to listen to on a portable device.
I've looked at the Yahoo! Music Engine (they emailed me about a job, but never got back to me) - and the one thing I don't understand is why they don't have special Yahoo! only Podcasts - YahooCasts or something -- something they aren't doing with this initiative. If you're sane you're asking "Why would they make Yahoo only podcasts?" - because their Music service is on a subscription model. People could make music show "podcast" (obviously in some sort of format specific to this service) with all the commercial music they want, and all the subscribers could listen to it without copyright concerns. It's something that might actually make their service appealing.
I'm an iTunes/iPod user and shuffle always gets annoying, and I don't have the time to keep making new playlists (which don't duplicate the "surprise factor" of radio anyway). If there was a subscription service where I could listen to podcasts with Music on my portable device I would be quite interested. Of course, Yahoo! would still have to deal with the iPod lock-in - their service currently requires WMA music players, which I'm not likely to buy in the first place.
Unfortunately, just like the SMB "standard," the Flash(tm) specification cannot be used to implement an open viewer.
That's true, it is a licensing restriction of that documentation, but there is a GPL Flash Player.
To me, the question comes down to: what's really important? Open specifications have been used and abused by Microsoft to bash competitors for time immemorial. (Microsoft sez: "We follow the open specification, but we've improved it!") The fact that Java was so open is what allowed Microsoft to kill it on the client-side. To me it's a question of abstract political what-ifs vs the practical reality of the issue.
That's the theory. In practice, Macromedia's Flash player has bugs that mean you end up with an unusable web browser and dozens of flash processes running in the background on some platforms.
My understanding (someone correct me if I'm wrong) is that this is actually a Firefox bug. Firefox doesn't send the proper message to plug-ins when they don't need to be running. This may only manifest itself when tabs are used, but I'm not sure.
Flash breaks just about everything about the web that made the web successful in the first place: open standards...
I think there's an open debate about what "made the web successful" that I won't engage in now, but I wanted to talk to one of your points. I believe you're incorrectly classifying Flash as not an open standard.
There's this belief that if someone owns a standard, it can't be open. In fact, even the W3C standards are owned by someone, they're copyright the W3C consortium. The opposite of open is not proprietary, it is secret. The Flash specification is not secret, if it was there wouldn't be Open Source Flash authoring tools.
[Credit where credit is due, Proprietary vs. Open reasoning stolen from Joe Clark's article on PDF accessibility. To quote Mr. Clark, "The entire discussion of proprietary vs. open is bogus."]
Movie ticket sales have been declining since the invention of television. According to Edward Jay Epstein, "In 1948, 90 million Americans--65 percent of the population--went to a movie house in an average week; in 2004, 30 million Americans--roughly 10 percent of the population--went to see a movie in an average week."
Epstein has been writing a number of quality articles for NPR & Slate about the Hollywood profit shift from movie theatres to home theatres. Here are a few of the recent ones.
See this post for why I believe the NPD studies commisioned by Macromedia.(You can find the relevant section of the post by seaching for "complete bullshit")
If you do see Flash in the Add/Remove Windows Components interface you're looking at the Stand Alone Flash Player. This is a separate program that can run Flash content outside of the browser. I believe it used to be installed when you got the Netscape-stlye plug-in. I don't know if this is still the case. (I have the Macromedia authoring tool, and that always installs it.) Flash bundled with Windows is a dll, and you need to download a program from Macromedia to uninstall it. It does come bundled with Windows XP, I haven't heard anything about if it will come with Vista.
a lot of people will disable Flash If you're talking about FlashBlock, I beleive Macromedia has been working with them to make it easier to just see the Flash content you want to see; and easily turn on Flash when you need it and to turn it off to avoid annoyances.
You certainly won't find Flash on any of my computers. I think your sample size is too small.
You may not be aware of this, but many of the components of Windows are in fact not written by them at all.
But branded as Microsoft right? Anyway, that's not really to the point.
Yes, Microsoft is going to try to compete, one element of that is the long-discussed-never-seen Project Sparkle. From the discussions of Vista, it sounds to me like they're going to make Avalon scriptable from "Trusted" webpages. If it's worth giving up the Flash install base for those features I'll be surprised.
I guess I'd wonder if you think commercial software development is worth it at all. I think Macromedia has really hit the sweet spot for being open while not being able to be embraced and extended. After the GPLFlash reverse engineering, Macromedia added wording to their EULA's that you couldn't reverse engineer the Player. So, since Microsoft didn't reverse engineer a player back when GPLFlash did, they now can't do so without attacking the validity of EULA's.
Before the Adobe merger/aquisition, there was always a concern that Microsoft would buy Macromedia. Now that they'll be Adobe, I really don't think Microsoft could aquire them without anti-trust problems - they're proably one of the, if not the, largest Windows & Mac cross-platform software developers. If they can't fend off Microsoft no one can.
In other words, you are saying that this is irrelevant, I agree.
I wonder why the ease of development and better user satisfaction was brought in in the grantparent post when you agree that it is at best of minor relevance.
Actually, I think I was ignoring what you had said and was making a separate argument against something you hadn't said. I've been replying to all the sub-threads and I may have gotten things a bit jumbled. Sorry about that.
I not sure that Flash is always easier to develop for that HTML/Javascript/Ajax (never having developed for Ajax myself). There are some things that are easier to do in both. I do agree that ease of development is a very minor consideration (except in extreme differences between technology), but user satisfaction isn't something I'd toss off. User satisfaction speaks to usability and effects the productivity of the people using the application. I have seen good improvements in productivity moving people from HTML/Javascript apps to Flash apps. I wouldn't discount that.
That study is either 10 years old, complete bullshit or both.
The study was one done a few years back and it was one of the Macromedia NPD studys. They don't seem to track Javascript anymore that I see so I don't know where it's at right now, but at the time when we were seeing those numbers my friends and I had a few hypothesises for why the numbers were that way. The big one was that the study was done at the time when pop-up windows were becoming a problem, but there weren't any pop-up blockers yet. (Or at least none that I knew of.) So, we theorized that hatred of pop-ups was driving people to disable Javascript. I know the community seemed to be moving in that direction at one point. Both Flash and Javacript had very high availability numbers (90-something percent), it's just that Flash edged out Javascript by 1 or 2 percent. I know it's surprising, but that doesn't imply that at one point in time it wasn't true.
I know you're going to say, "Macromedia paid for the study! Bias. Bias. Bias!", but I would make two points. One, Macromedia also sells the most popular Javascript authoring program, Dreamweaver. If you read their financial reports you know that they make more money on Dreamweaver. It goes against their interests to report low Javascript numbers. Secondly, historically, their studies have also tracked the adoption of their Shockwave plug-in. This used to be the most installed plug-in and they built a line of products around it, including servers for creating dynamic Shockwave content. Their studies have shown the gradual eroding of the Shockwave install base. I've used Director (the Macromedia tool that creates Shockwave content), and I have more than once wanted to use its plug-in on a project, but then I look a those numbers and recommend against it. Director is great if you don't need the plug-in (CD-ROM or DVD for example), but I don't think I'll ever recommend it for online use.
Of the modern browsers that dont support javascript or a close variation, name me exactly one that does support flash.
I don't know of any, but that a client has Javascipt built-in doesn't imply that everyone has it enabled. Some people have Flash installed, but run FlashBlock, don't they?
I know you want me to accept your credentials and experience to beleive that Flash isn't very widely installed in spite of the evidence I have otherwise, but I'm not going to.
Flash comes with Windows as a DLL, if you want to uninstall it there's a program you download from Macromedia to do so. I don't know of anyone who has done this in a corporate environment, but maybe you do.
I think you're trying to say (I have worked a lot with banks, financial institutions and such... very few of them install flash), "I have big clients and they won't use Flash." If you want to get into the "my potential clients are bigger than yours" argument, I'll just point out one clien
I couldn't help but notive that someone has just hacked the webpage for Geoff Stearns Flash Object. That seems to be the only page on the server effected. Was that done by someone here? Is someone here threatened by Flash? If so why?
Flash has an open specification and there are open source tools for creating it. Open Source isn't all about creating One True Implementation - attacking people supporting technologies you claim you don't even use doesn't make sense. Does it make you sad to think that other people might be happy? Chewbacca lives on Endor...
virtually anything that comes bundled with Windows becomes MS property over time
I'm not sure what you're referring to - most bundled Windows elements were created by Microsoft. The only shifts I remember were from one Microsoft product to another. Netscape wasn't bundled with computers by Microsoft, it was bundled in by OEMs.
Especially with more and more sites using Flash for video, I really don't see Microsoft refusing to bundle Flash. It would cause too much broken Internet functionality. Can you see reviews of Vista if they did so? "Windows Vista offers few improvements, breaks Homestarrunner":)
I know some people will never be happy if something isn't a completely open specification open source endevor. I don't think that's realistic for one reason - too much openness is what killed off client side Java. Openness is what allowed Microsoft to embrace and extend it into oblivion.
I truely think Ajax is more vulnerable than Flash. The defining implementation of the cornerstone Ajax object was done by Microsoft; what makes you think they won't take advantage of that?
the point is that its a lot more work to do in Flash some things you get for free in the browser
And vice-versa as rndmcnlly commented in his post. It sounds like you're familiar with Flash, and know that there are different ways to scale the elements, and to me that's an asset. (If you need to do something like you talked about it looks like there's some example code in the comments of the third full browser Flash article.)
I would pose to you, though, that for creating simple web applications you might want to use Flash's old default scaling behavior instead - which is to scale every element proportionally. After all, what application besides a document reader do you scroll? If Apple was right that bad usability arises when we hide elements in a right-click menu, what happens when you hide elements below the fold?
I used Flash's proportional scaling for one of the in-house applications I built and it worked great. The limited screen space made us carefully consider the design, and the users thought it worked well. I had one manager who was always having a hard time reading image-based websites because she had her resolution set very low, but when she brought up my proportionally scaling web application she had no problems at all. Things didn't look as pretty and smooth at low-res, but everything was in its palce, and everything worked.
That, btw, is what I consider Flash's ultimate future-proofing. If you use all vector assets in a proportiaonlly scaling Flash app, your application will work 30 years from now when we have 300dpi displays. There are a number of old content sites that I've noticed super-sizeing their content, because of how screen resolutions have changed over the past 5 years.
Also, there is a trick for using a browser's scroll bar with scaling Flash if you have one dimension fixed and the other one is scaled, but it's a little bit of a hack, and I'm not sure anyone's interested.
The thing with all these examples is, we're having a discussion about the merits of a technology based on examples of that technology. It would have been similar to arguing that we shouldn't develop nuclear power when all we had seen was the atom bomb. In the web world, it would be similar to visiting Mirsky's Worst of the Web back in 1995 and declaring, "nothing good can come of this!" If you really don't like these sites, that doesn't explain to me why you don't think you could build something better with the same technology.
Nonetheless, I'm going to follow on this discussion track a little more. I did have a hard time finding good/interesting Flash applications. The one that I honestly think is the best example, Flash Earth, is a remix of two Ajax applications. At the same time, we really are just beginning the transition to the application heavy web, and I wouldn't be surprised to see many more good applications spring up in the next 6 months.
Reguarding Saving - that's something that's up to the developer, though like all files you can dredge them out of the cache if you need to. Some developers like to share, going so far as to put View Source items in their right click menus to allow you to download the code. There's nothing about Flash that prevents people from letting you download elements. Personally, if people don't want to let you do that, I wouldn't hold that against the technology they're using. To give a non-Flash example example, a lot of Quicktime movie trailers don't provide download links anymore. I often do a view source, find the file reference, create a link in a new HTML file, right-click Save As, and download the movie. For some QuickTime movies that doesn't work, they've used Quicktime to create a shell for streaming the movie off the Internet. When I encounter either of these situations I don't think "Quicktime sucks", I think, "the developer was foolish for not letting me download advertising".
As far as interoperability goes, and from a hacker mentality, I really see you point. When I switch hats to a content developer/service provider mentality, I disagree that Flash is at a disadvantage to Ajax on this front. Let me put it this way, there's a big difference between providing public API's for your application, and having Greasemonkey fiddle with its bits.
Pretend I'm Google, and I've put out Gmail. Now along comes someone with a Greasemonkey mod that turns Gmail into a Peer-to-Peer network. (I'm talking hypothetical here -- I think.) Ok, now there's two things to consider: First, I might not want this hack that people have added on top of my site. It might get me in big legal trouble, and I might not even like Peer-to-Peer networks. Is there any way for me to stop this without legal action or without playing an escalating arms race of code changes with the modders? Secondly, what if I really like the mod, what if more people are using my site for the mod than for the original functionality and I don't want to break it. Am I stuck in development limbo? One of the big advantages of web applications is the Zero-install environment. If I fix a bug in a web application I don't have to push out changes to anyone, everyone who visits the site is using the newest version. What if fixing my bug means breaking eveyone else's hack? While the theoretical promise of the mod that's more popular than the original is alluring (see Half-Life and Counter Strike), this is really not a place I want to be as a web developer. I don't want to piss off my users just for maintaining my code. It's an entirely different thing if I've published an external API of course, that's not dependent on how I implemented my code - interoperable systems like Greasemonkey are.
I'll admit that in some ways the interoperability argument I just made is a bit silly, because there isn't anything inherient in Flash that prevents someone from creating "Greasemonkey for Flash". But that's the larger point. Down at the roots, Flash and Ajax applications are quite similar. They're both EMCAscripting they just have different object models and different run-time environments. From my perspective, the differences favor Flash.
An invisible gif with alt-text is also a good trick if you need to provide a separate site for screen readers. (Not a trick I've used with Flash, but long ago when supplemental text-only versions of sites were more common.)
I don't pretend to understand Google and I don't know if being all Flash effects pagerank or anything like that, but Flash 8 is adding a set of embedded meta-data values to help search engines. I don't know the implementation so it might just get ignored like html metadata has been, but it's good to know Macromedia is trying to address concerns.
Flash 8 is coming out early next month, I beleive, so look for a free 30-day trial then. The nice thing about Macromedia trial versions is that they are fully functional for 30 dayas. Back when Flash 5 was new, I got a freelance job that wanted to use it right away (it was for "cutting edge" marketing so they didn't mind using a plug-in that had just come out) - So, being poor at the time, I downloaded the free trial which was released the same day as the full version. By the end of my 30-day trial I had made many times the cost of the full version of Flash using the Trial, and was easily able to buy a full version with my profits. --- If I have a pro-Flash bias, that experience might explain it.:)
I think there are a couple of reasons for the misperception about Flash install numbers but the biggest one is that, it's come bundled with the browsers forever. When everyone was using Netscape and IE wasn't a big player both browsers came with Flash already installed. Microsoft and Apple OSes have come with Flash pre-installed for 5 or 6 years. People used to notice when they had to go and update their player, but they've added auto-update functionality, and now most users never have a reason to ask themselves "do I have Flash installed?"
Since flash is easy to develop for, it is a lot easier for a mediacore developer to make an application that is satisfying to the end-userm (not trying to imply that you are a mediacore developer here btw). This obviously results in better user satisfaction... for those users that can use your application that is.
You know, this is the exact same argument that was originally made against developing apps on the web. Hey, look at Mirskey's Worst of the Web - HTML sucks, not everyone has an Internet connection you're leaving people out. It's the same argument, different tune.
You should realize that in quite a few corporate environments users cannot )and are not allowed to) install a plugin, and many such environments regard flash as a potential security risk. As a consequence, there is a substantial part of the market that cannot use Flash based apps.
As a Flash developer, I've heard this before, and it's never proven to be true. A few years back there was a study of Internet client capabilities and by a very small percent more clients were supporting Flash than were supporting Javascript. Should I have read that and sworn off Javascript?
that is payed for by the solution lasting longer.
I've heard that claim about Ajax, but I've lived it with Flash. Over the past 6 years I've never had a compatibility problems with Flash. I sure can't say that about my experience with HTML or Javascript.
That can be said about the majority of web technologies, if you want to support IE, you get to jump through lots of hoops.
Honestly, that's why I moved to Flash. It just works on all the browsers, and I never have to retrofit changes to keep up compatibility.
web site/application/whatever should still be accessable without all of the handy dandy technology, regardless of what it is.
I've heard this so many times it's really starting to lose meaning to me. Way back when I had to write a web app that didn't use Forms because not all browsers supported them. If this line of reasoning is taken to its logical extreme we should just all write text files instead of HTML, and people can telnet into port 80 to read the files, because you know, I wouldn't doubt that more computers have telnet than have a web browser.
Yes, you're drawing a line and saying that people without a certain set of specs or a certain program installed won't be able to see what you're doing, but you are doing that already. Not everyone has to settle on the same lowest common denominator. It's always a question of how low you want to go.
The Flash/Javascript Integration Kit (originally developed by Macromedia with an open license, now hosted on Open Source Flash) works with these Mac browsers ( Macintosh Opera 8.0, Macintosh Firefox 1.0, Safari 1.2.4 and 2.0 ) - if you're having problems with Flash and browser communication check it out. There are supposed to be better methods in the next version of Flash (which is out in a few weeks), but this works now.
You might be right - it used to come with the browser downloads, but I couldn't confirm that as the case anymore - though it does still come bundled when you install Windows.
I've programmed strictly server (no Javascript) applications, Javascript + server applications, and Flash + server applications. In my experience Flash is the easiest to develop, and has the highest user satisfaction. That's why I'm curious why there's so much excitement over Ajax when it seems so sub-optimal to me.
maelstrom was saying that Flash is bad because it worked as a zero-install environment for fewer clients than Ajax (using himself as an example with LinuxPPC). In my comment I was pointing out that for the majority environment, Windows with Internet Explorer, Flash and Ajax have the same status, they both require ActiveX controls.
Also, and I haven't researched this much, but posts in this topic lead me to believe that Ajax isn't well standardized ( XmlHttpRequest object differences ), and isn't as universally supported as I thought it was. I think the perception of wide-support might be artifically inflated because it works in "the browser I use now", without reguard to the population of clients that actually use the Internet.
One point you make is that you don't like having to trust Macromedia/Adobe for your operating environment. From my perspective it appears that Ajax has the opposite problem and it's much worse - not that you have to trust one company, but that you have to trust all of them (and one of them is Microsoft.) When one of them starts messing up their implementation everyone suffers.
I've always thought Breeze was pretty impressive. It's a collaboration suite for meetings, events, and presentations. The part of it that's easist to demonstrate is the presentation part, since Macromedia often uses Breeze presentations in their marketing - here's a Breeze presentation about Macromedia Flex. It's like a virtual PowerPoint presentation, but I think it's much more pleasant to watch a Breeze presentation than to click through someone's slides on the web.
LivePlasma, is certainly something that I wouldn't know how to implement in plain HTML.
I guess most of these examples are data visualization/presentation software, but then that's what most of the web is, isn't it? I personally prefer Flash as a video player, but that's not necessarily what we're talking about here.
I guess my question is, is there something inherient in Flash that you think makes it crappy?
As you've said, web games, which are the most client-side intensive content on the web use Flash very well, is there some inherient reason you think these capabilites couldn't be employed for serious purposes?
That sucks that you have to run a separate browser for Flash. There is the Open Source player, but I don't know if anyone's compiled it for 64-bit CPUus or not.
At the same time, I'm not sure that Ajax has the lead on Flash for supported platforms. Flash, for example, works just fine in old browsers. If someone has Netscape 4 (some companies still have policies to support Netscape 4) can they view an Ajax site?
Based on jalefkowit's post in this thread, I'm getting a strong sense of deja-vu from this whole Ajax business - it reminds me of the beginnings of the browser incompatibility wars.
- firstly, and this is very important, if a page is made entirely in flash then a search engine can't glean text from it when it comes to crawl it if all your content is compiled into a swf.
The search engine SDK (for people who make search engines) has been freely available since 2002. At the very least we know that Google does read the text in Flash files. (I honestly haven't kept track of other search engines - does anyone know?)
secondly, jpg images look crusty in flash.
In the past there were some bitmap display bugs in Flash. Tinic Uro, a Principle Engineer on the Flash Player, has a good blog post about the bugs they fixed in the latest release. I honestly don't personally know of any outstanding issues with bitmap display. Did you see any problems with the bitmaps in the Flash Earth page I linked to?
the quality of text rendered in a swf is fairly terrible when it's small
You have a point about older versions of Flash. You did have to take care with font selection and placement to get good quality at small font sizes. This is another problem that has greatly improved in the latest release. Flash 8 has a new font rendering system, "FlashType" (huzzah for the creative marketing team). The long and short is that it renders small type very well now. I've seen examples of the new type that I mistook for browser text before they were pointed out to be Flash.
text is unselectable
The selectability of type is a decision made at authoring time. It makes sense to have text selectable sometimes (eg body text), but not others (eg text on buttons).
That's not accurate, Flash movies can run at a percentage size. In fact, Actionscript.com just recently put out a series of articles about full browser flash, though it's a capability that Flash has had for as long as I can remember.
Oh no, I didn't intend to imply that at all. Indeed, Flash and Ajax are quite similar in some ways, the scripting is ECMAScript for both. I just posed the question because I do this type of programming, but I haven't done much Javascript lately and was wondering if Ajax was worth my time.
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I don't think LaunchCast is what I'm talking about. LaunchCast seems to be a streaming music service (similar to the Radio section of iTunes, as well as a wide variety of streaming services). Its main innovation seems to be that it can create custom radio stations for you based on your preferences.
One reason that Podcasts are mostly talk-radio shows is the lack of a royalty license agreements similar to what commercial radio has. This is something that would be very difficult to set up with traditional Podcasts because they are in the MP3 format, and there's nothing to prevent a song that was "broadcast" from being easily saved with no degredation.
The reason I was thinking about Music broadcasts is because when I'm on the go - listening to my iPod. Sometimes I really like having the Podcasts on there - they're like short little NPR vignettes in between the music. Often, however, I am wanting to listen to music, and the talk segments are annoying and instantly skipped over. I'm looking for DJs to make "music radio" for me to listen to on a portable device.
I've looked at the Yahoo! Music Engine (they emailed me about a job, but never got back to me) - and the one thing I don't understand is why they don't have special Yahoo! only Podcasts - YahooCasts or something -- something they aren't doing with this initiative. If you're sane you're asking "Why would they make Yahoo only podcasts?" - because their Music service is on a subscription model. People could make music show "podcast" (obviously in some sort of format specific to this service) with all the commercial music they want, and all the subscribers could listen to it without copyright concerns. It's something that might actually make their service appealing.
I'm an iTunes/iPod user and shuffle always gets annoying, and I don't have the time to keep making new playlists (which don't duplicate the "surprise factor" of radio anyway). If there was a subscription service where I could listen to podcasts with Music on my portable device I would be quite interested. Of course, Yahoo! would still have to deal with the iPod lock-in - their service currently requires WMA music players, which I'm not likely to buy in the first place.
No; the opposite of open is use-controlled.
So GPL'ed code isn't open?
Unfortunately, just like the SMB "standard," the Flash(tm) specification cannot be used to implement an open viewer.
That's true, it is a licensing restriction of that documentation, but there is a GPL Flash Player.
To me, the question comes down to: what's really important? Open specifications have been used and abused by Microsoft to bash competitors for time immemorial. (Microsoft sez: "We follow the open specification, but we've improved it!") The fact that Java was so open is what allowed Microsoft to kill it on the client-side. To me it's a question of abstract political what-ifs vs the practical reality of the issue.
That's the theory. In practice, Macromedia's Flash player has bugs that mean you end up with an unusable web browser and dozens of flash processes running in the background on some platforms.
My understanding (someone correct me if I'm wrong) is that this is actually a Firefox bug. Firefox doesn't send the proper message to plug-ins when they don't need to be running. This may only manifest itself when tabs are used, but I'm not sure.
Flash breaks just about everything about the web that made the web successful in the first place: open standards...
I think there's an open debate about what "made the web successful" that I won't engage in now, but I wanted to talk to one of your points. I believe you're incorrectly classifying Flash as not an open standard.
There's this belief that if someone owns a standard, it can't be open. In fact, even the W3C standards are owned by someone, they're copyright the W3C consortium. The opposite of open is not proprietary, it is secret. The Flash specification is not secret, if it was there wouldn't be Open Source Flash authoring tools.
[Credit where credit is due, Proprietary vs. Open reasoning stolen from Joe Clark's article on PDF accessibility. To quote Mr. Clark, "The entire discussion of proprietary vs. open is bogus."]
Movie ticket sales have been declining since the invention of television. According to Edward Jay Epstein, "In 1948, 90 million Americans--65 percent of the population--went to a movie house in an average week; in 2004, 30 million Americans--roughly 10 percent of the population--went to see a movie in an average week."
Epstein has been writing a number of quality articles for NPR & Slate about the Hollywood profit shift from movie theatres to home theatres. Here are a few of the recent ones.
The Vanishing Box Office
Hollywood's Death Spiral
Hollywood's Death Spiral, Part 2
Hollywood's Profits, Demystified
See this post for why I believe the NPD studies commisioned by Macromedia.(You can find the relevant section of the post by seaching for "complete bullshit")
If you do see Flash in the Add/Remove Windows Components interface you're looking at the Stand Alone Flash Player. This is a separate program that can run Flash content outside of the browser. I believe it used to be installed when you got the Netscape-stlye plug-in. I don't know if this is still the case. (I have the Macromedia authoring tool, and that always installs it.) Flash bundled with Windows is a dll, and you need to download a program from Macromedia to uninstall it. It does come bundled with Windows XP, I haven't heard anything about if it will come with Vista.
a lot of people will disable Flash
If you're talking about FlashBlock, I beleive Macromedia has been working with them to make it easier to just see the Flash content you want to see; and easily turn on Flash when you need it and to turn it off to avoid annoyances.
You certainly won't find Flash on any of my computers.
I think your sample size is too small.
You may not be aware of this, but many of the components of Windows are in fact not written by them at all.
But branded as Microsoft right? Anyway, that's not really to the point.
Yes, Microsoft is going to try to compete, one element of that is the long-discussed-never-seen Project Sparkle. From the discussions of Vista, it sounds to me like they're going to make Avalon scriptable from "Trusted" webpages. If it's worth giving up the Flash install base for those features I'll be surprised.
I guess I'd wonder if you think commercial software development is worth it at all. I think Macromedia has really hit the sweet spot for being open while not being able to be embraced and extended. After the GPLFlash reverse engineering, Macromedia added wording to their EULA's that you couldn't reverse engineer the Player. So, since Microsoft didn't reverse engineer a player back when GPLFlash did, they now can't do so without attacking the validity of EULA's.
Before the Adobe merger/aquisition, there was always a concern that Microsoft would buy Macromedia. Now that they'll be Adobe, I really don't think Microsoft could aquire them without anti-trust problems - they're proably one of the, if not the, largest Windows & Mac cross-platform software developers. If they can't fend off Microsoft no one can.
In other words, you are saying that this is irrelevant, I agree.
I wonder why the ease of development and better user satisfaction was brought in in the grantparent post when you agree that it is at best of minor relevance.
Actually, I think I was ignoring what you had said and was making a separate argument against something you hadn't said. I've been replying to all the sub-threads and I may have gotten things a bit jumbled. Sorry about that.
I not sure that Flash is always easier to develop for that HTML/Javascript/Ajax (never having developed for Ajax myself). There are some things that are easier to do in both. I do agree that ease of development is a very minor consideration (except in extreme differences between technology), but user satisfaction isn't something I'd toss off. User satisfaction speaks to usability and effects the productivity of the people using the application. I have seen good improvements in productivity moving people from HTML/Javascript apps to Flash apps. I wouldn't discount that.
That study is either 10 years old, complete bullshit or both.
The study was one done a few years back and it was one of the Macromedia NPD studys. They don't seem to track Javascript anymore that I see so I don't know where it's at right now, but at the time when we were seeing those numbers my friends and I had a few hypothesises for why the numbers were that way. The big one was that the study was done at the time when pop-up windows were becoming a problem, but there weren't any pop-up blockers yet. (Or at least none that I knew of.) So, we theorized that hatred of pop-ups was driving people to disable Javascript. I know the community seemed to be moving in that direction at one point. Both Flash and Javacript had very high availability numbers (90-something percent), it's just that Flash edged out Javascript by 1 or 2 percent. I know it's surprising, but that doesn't imply that at one point in time it wasn't true.
I know you're going to say, "Macromedia paid for the study! Bias. Bias. Bias!", but I would make two points. One, Macromedia also sells the most popular Javascript authoring program, Dreamweaver. If you read their financial reports you know that they make more money on Dreamweaver. It goes against their interests to report low Javascript numbers. Secondly, historically, their studies have also tracked the adoption of their Shockwave plug-in. This used to be the most installed plug-in and they built a line of products around it, including servers for creating dynamic Shockwave content. Their studies have shown the gradual eroding of the Shockwave install base. I've used Director (the Macromedia tool that creates Shockwave content), and I have more than once wanted to use its plug-in on a project, but then I look a those numbers and recommend against it. Director is great if you don't need the plug-in (CD-ROM or DVD for example), but I don't think I'll ever recommend it for online use.
Of the modern browsers that dont support javascript or a close variation, name me exactly one that does support flash.
I don't know of any, but that a client has Javascipt built-in doesn't imply that everyone has it enabled. Some people have Flash installed, but run FlashBlock, don't they?
I know you want me to accept your credentials and experience to beleive that Flash isn't very widely installed in spite of the evidence I have otherwise, but I'm not going to.
Flash comes with Windows as a DLL, if you want to uninstall it there's a program you download from Macromedia to do so. I don't know of anyone who has done this in a corporate environment, but maybe you do.
I think you're trying to say (I have worked a lot with banks, financial institutions and such... very few of them install flash), "I have big clients and they won't use Flash." If you want to get into the "my potential clients are bigger than yours" argument, I'll just point out one clien
I couldn't help but notive that someone has just hacked the webpage for Geoff Stearns Flash Object. That seems to be the only page on the server effected. Was that done by someone here? Is someone here threatened by Flash? If so why?
Flash has an open specification and there are open source tools for creating it. Open Source isn't all about creating One True Implementation - attacking people supporting technologies you claim you don't even use doesn't make sense. Does it make you sad to think that other people might be happy? Chewbacca lives on Endor...
virtually anything that comes bundled with Windows becomes MS property over time
:)
I'm not sure what you're referring to - most bundled Windows elements were created by Microsoft. The only shifts I remember were from one Microsoft product to another. Netscape wasn't bundled with computers by Microsoft, it was bundled in by OEMs.
Especially with more and more sites using Flash for video, I really don't see Microsoft refusing to bundle Flash. It would cause too much broken Internet functionality. Can you see reviews of Vista if they did so? "Windows Vista offers few improvements, breaks Homestarrunner"
I know some people will never be happy if something isn't a completely open specification open source endevor. I don't think that's realistic for one reason - too much openness is what killed off client side Java. Openness is what allowed Microsoft to embrace and extend it into oblivion.
I truely think Ajax is more vulnerable than Flash. The defining implementation of the cornerstone Ajax object was done by Microsoft; what makes you think they won't take advantage of that?
the point is that its a lot more work to do in Flash some things you get for free in the browser
And vice-versa as rndmcnlly commented in his post. It sounds like you're familiar with Flash, and know that there are different ways to scale the elements, and to me that's an asset. (If you need to do something like you talked about it looks like there's some example code in the comments of the third full browser Flash article.)
I would pose to you, though, that for creating simple web applications you might want to use Flash's old default scaling behavior instead - which is to scale every element proportionally. After all, what application besides a document reader do you scroll? If Apple was right that bad usability arises when we hide elements in a right-click menu, what happens when you hide elements below the fold?
I used Flash's proportional scaling for one of the in-house applications I built and it worked great. The limited screen space made us carefully consider the design, and the users thought it worked well. I had one manager who was always having a hard time reading image-based websites because she had her resolution set very low, but when she brought up my proportionally scaling web application she had no problems at all. Things didn't look as pretty and smooth at low-res, but everything was in its palce, and everything worked.
That, btw, is what I consider Flash's ultimate future-proofing. If you use all vector assets in a proportiaonlly scaling Flash app, your application will work 30 years from now when we have 300dpi displays. There are a number of old content sites that I've noticed super-sizeing their content, because of how screen resolutions have changed over the past 5 years.
Also, there is a trick for using a browser's scroll bar with scaling Flash if you have one dimension fixed and the other one is scaled, but it's a little bit of a hack, and I'm not sure anyone's interested.
The thing with all these examples is, we're having a discussion about the merits of a technology based on examples of that technology. It would have been similar to arguing that we shouldn't develop nuclear power when all we had seen was the atom bomb. In the web world, it would be similar to visiting Mirsky's Worst of the Web back in 1995 and declaring, "nothing good can come of this!" If you really don't like these sites, that doesn't explain to me why you don't think you could build something better with the same technology.
Nonetheless, I'm going to follow on this discussion track a little more. I did have a hard time finding good/interesting Flash applications. The one that I honestly think is the best example, Flash Earth, is a remix of two Ajax applications. At the same time, we really are just beginning the transition to the application heavy web, and I wouldn't be surprised to see many more good applications spring up in the next 6 months.
Reguarding Saving - that's something that's up to the developer, though like all files you can dredge them out of the cache if you need to. Some developers like to share, going so far as to put View Source items in their right click menus to allow you to download the code. There's nothing about Flash that prevents people from letting you download elements. Personally, if people don't want to let you do that, I wouldn't hold that against the technology they're using. To give a non-Flash example example, a lot of Quicktime movie trailers don't provide download links anymore. I often do a view source, find the file reference, create a link in a new HTML file, right-click Save As, and download the movie. For some QuickTime movies that doesn't work, they've used Quicktime to create a shell for streaming the movie off the Internet. When I encounter either of these situations I don't think "Quicktime sucks", I think, "the developer was foolish for not letting me download advertising".
As far as interoperability goes, and from a hacker mentality, I really see you point. When I switch hats to a content developer/service provider mentality, I disagree that Flash is at a disadvantage to Ajax on this front. Let me put it this way, there's a big difference between providing public API's for your application, and having Greasemonkey fiddle with its bits.
Pretend I'm Google, and I've put out Gmail. Now along comes someone with a Greasemonkey mod that turns Gmail into a Peer-to-Peer network. (I'm talking hypothetical here -- I think.) Ok, now there's two things to consider: First, I might not want this hack that people have added on top of my site. It might get me in big legal trouble, and I might not even like Peer-to-Peer networks. Is there any way for me to stop this without legal action or without playing an escalating arms race of code changes with the modders? Secondly, what if I really like the mod, what if more people are using my site for the mod than for the original functionality and I don't want to break it. Am I stuck in development limbo? One of the big advantages of web applications is the Zero-install environment. If I fix a bug in a web application I don't have to push out changes to anyone, everyone who visits the site is using the newest version. What if fixing my bug means breaking eveyone else's hack? While the theoretical promise of the mod that's more popular than the original is alluring (see Half-Life and Counter Strike), this is really not a place I want to be as a web developer. I don't want to piss off my users just for maintaining my code. It's an entirely different thing if I've published an external API of course, that's not dependent on how I implemented my code - interoperable systems like Greasemonkey are.
I'll admit that in some ways the interoperability argument I just made is a bit silly, because there isn't anything inherient in Flash that prevents someone from creating "Greasemonkey for Flash". But that's the larger point. Down at the roots, Flash and Ajax applications are quite similar. They're both EMCAscripting they just have different object models and different run-time environments. From my perspective, the differences favor Flash.
An invisible gif with alt-text is also a good trick if you need to provide a separate site for screen readers. (Not a trick I've used with Flash, but long ago when supplemental text-only versions of sites were more common.)
:)
I don't pretend to understand Google and I don't know if being all Flash effects pagerank or anything like that, but Flash 8 is adding a set of embedded meta-data values to help search engines. I don't know the implementation so it might just get ignored like html metadata has been, but it's good to know Macromedia is trying to address concerns.
Flash 8 is coming out early next month, I beleive, so look for a free 30-day trial then. The nice thing about Macromedia trial versions is that they are fully functional for 30 dayas. Back when Flash 5 was new, I got a freelance job that wanted to use it right away (it was for "cutting edge" marketing so they didn't mind using a plug-in that had just come out) - So, being poor at the time, I downloaded the free trial which was released the same day as the full version. By the end of my 30-day trial I had made many times the cost of the full version of Flash using the Trial, and was easily able to buy a full version with my profits. --- If I have a pro-Flash bias, that experience might explain it.
I'd wager that the number of people with Flash (perhaps 30%?)
That's not an accurate assessment. According to an NPD Online - Worldwide Survey 97.6% of Internet enabled PCs support Flash 5. Like I said in another post, I've had people tell me - "people won't be able to see it, it's in Flash, not eveyone has Flash" and then never had a single problem or complaint. You may doubt the numbers, but Amazon.com has used Flash on their homepage, if it wasn't widely installed to you really think they'd have done that to their users?
I think there are a couple of reasons for the misperception about Flash install numbers but the biggest one is that, it's come bundled with the browsers forever. When everyone was using Netscape and IE wasn't a big player both browsers came with Flash already installed. Microsoft and Apple OSes have come with Flash pre-installed for 5 or 6 years. People used to notice when they had to go and update their player, but they've added auto-update functionality, and now most users never have a reason to ask themselves "do I have Flash installed?"
Since flash is easy to develop for, it is a lot easier for a mediacore developer to make an application that is satisfying to the end-userm (not trying to imply that you are a mediacore developer here btw). This obviously results in better user satisfaction... for those users that can use your application that is.
You know, this is the exact same argument that was originally made against developing apps on the web. Hey, look at Mirskey's Worst of the Web - HTML sucks, not everyone has an Internet connection you're leaving people out. It's the same argument, different tune.
You should realize that in quite a few corporate environments users cannot )and are not allowed to) install a plugin, and many such environments regard flash as a potential security risk. As a consequence, there is a substantial part of the market that cannot use Flash based apps.
As a Flash developer, I've heard this before, and it's never proven to be true. A few years back there was a study of Internet client capabilities and by a very small percent more clients were supporting Flash than were supporting Javascript. Should I have read that and sworn off Javascript?
that is payed for by the solution lasting longer.
I've heard that claim about Ajax, but I've lived it with Flash. Over the past 6 years I've never had a compatibility problems with Flash. I sure can't say that about my experience with HTML or Javascript.
That can be said about the majority of web technologies, if you want to support IE, you get to jump through lots of hoops.
Honestly, that's why I moved to Flash. It just works on all the browsers, and I never have to retrofit changes to keep up compatibility.
web site/application/whatever should still be accessable without all of the handy dandy technology, regardless of what it is.
I've heard this so many times it's really starting to lose meaning to me. Way back when I had to write a web app that didn't use Forms because not all browsers supported them. If this line of reasoning is taken to its logical extreme we should just all write text files instead of HTML, and people can telnet into port 80 to read the files, because you know, I wouldn't doubt that more computers have telnet than have a web browser.
Yes, you're drawing a line and saying that people without a certain set of specs or a certain program installed won't be able to see what you're doing, but you are doing that already. Not everyone has to settle on the same lowest common denominator. It's always a question of how low you want to go.
The Flash/Javascript Integration Kit (originally developed by Macromedia with an open license, now hosted on Open Source Flash) works with these Mac browsers ( Macintosh Opera 8.0, Macintosh Firefox 1.0, Safari 1.2.4 and 2.0 ) - if you're having problems with Flash and browser communication check it out. There are supposed to be better methods in the next version of Flash (which is out in a few weeks), but this works now.
You might be right - it used to come with the browser downloads, but I couldn't confirm that as the case anymore - though it does still come bundled when you install Windows.
0 1/09-11xpmacromediapr.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2001/sep
I've programmed strictly server (no Javascript) applications, Javascript + server applications, and Flash + server applications. In my experience Flash is the easiest to develop, and has the highest user satisfaction. That's why I'm curious why there's so much excitement over Ajax when it seems so sub-optimal to me.
maelstrom was saying that Flash is bad because it worked as a zero-install environment for fewer clients than Ajax (using himself as an example with LinuxPPC). In my comment I was pointing out that for the majority environment, Windows with Internet Explorer, Flash and Ajax have the same status, they both require ActiveX controls.
Also, and I haven't researched this much, but posts in this topic lead me to believe that Ajax isn't well standardized ( XmlHttpRequest object differences ), and isn't as universally supported as I thought it was. I think the perception of wide-support might be artifically inflated because it works in "the browser I use now", without reguard to the population of clients that actually use the Internet.
One point you make is that you don't like having to trust Macromedia/Adobe for your operating environment. From my perspective it appears that Ajax has the opposite problem and it's much worse - not that you have to trust one company, but that you have to trust all of them (and one of them is Microsoft.) When one of them starts messing up their implementation everyone suffers.
I've always thought Breeze was pretty impressive. It's a collaboration suite for meetings, events, and presentations. The part of it that's easist to demonstrate is the presentation part, since Macromedia often uses Breeze presentations in their marketing - here's a Breeze presentation about Macromedia Flex. It's like a virtual PowerPoint presentation, but I think it's much more pleasant to watch a Breeze presentation than to click through someone's slides on the web.
LivePlasma, is certainly something that I wouldn't know how to implement in plain HTML.
http://www.slideroll.com/>Slideroll creates online slideshows.
The whole, zoom in and out on pictures thing used to be a good example, but Google Maps and Virtual Earth both know that trick.
I guess most of these examples are data visualization/presentation software, but then that's what most of the web is, isn't it? I personally prefer Flash as a video player, but that's not necessarily what we're talking about here.
I guess my question is, is there something inherient in Flash that you think makes it crappy?
As you've said, web games, which are the most client-side intensive content on the web use Flash very well, is there some inherient reason you think these capabilites couldn't be employed for serious purposes?
That sucks that you have to run a separate browser for Flash. There is the Open Source player, but I don't know if anyone's compiled it for 64-bit CPUus or not.
At the same time, I'm not sure that Ajax has the lead on Flash for supported platforms. Flash, for example, works just fine in old browsers. If someone has Netscape 4 (some companies still have policies to support Netscape 4) can they view an Ajax site?
Based on jalefkowit's post in this thread, I'm getting a strong sense of deja-vu from this whole Ajax business - it reminds me of the beginnings of the browser incompatibility wars.
Your point about M$ not being able or willing to negotiate with Macromedia to have plug-ins pre-installed...
You're misreading the post. Flash has come bundled with Windows and Internet Explorer for as long as I can remember.
- firstly, and this is very important, if a page is made entirely in flash then a search engine can't glean text from it when it comes to crawl it if all your content is compiled into a swf.
The search engine SDK (for people who make search engines) has been freely available since 2002. At the very least we know that Google does read the text in Flash files. (I honestly haven't kept track of other search engines - does anyone know?)
secondly, jpg images look crusty in flash.
In the past there were some bitmap display bugs in Flash. Tinic Uro, a Principle Engineer on the Flash Player, has a good blog post about the bugs they fixed in the latest release. I honestly don't personally know of any outstanding issues with bitmap display. Did you see any problems with the bitmaps in the Flash Earth page I linked to?
the quality of text rendered in a swf is fairly terrible when it's small
You have a point about older versions of Flash. You did have to take care with font selection and placement to get good quality at small font sizes. This is another problem that has greatly improved in the latest release. Flash 8 has a new font rendering system, "FlashType" (huzzah for the creative marketing team). The long and short is that it renders small type very well now. I've seen examples of the new type that I mistook for browser text before they were pointed out to be Flash.
text is unselectable
The selectability of type is a decision made at authoring time. It makes sense to have text selectable sometimes (eg body text), but not others (eg text on buttons).
Flash movies must always run at a fixed size.
That's not accurate, Flash movies can run at a percentage size. In fact, Actionscript.com just recently put out a series of articles about full browser flash, though it's a capability that Flash has had for as long as I can remember.
Oh no, I didn't intend to imply that at all. Indeed, Flash and Ajax are quite similar in some ways, the scripting is ECMAScript for both. I just posed the question because I do this type of programming, but I haven't done much Javascript lately and was wondering if Ajax was worth my time.