Contents tagged with Adobe

  • Flash Lite on Windows Mobile

    4 Comments

    Lots of people are pointing to the release of Flash "Light" on Windows Mobile by Microsoft and claiming that this is to "hold people over" until Silverlight gets here. That is just utter BS. Who the hell has ever used a Flash Light site on their phone? Hell, who really uses Windows Mobile to do any web surfing? Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever used a Flash "Light" site. Ever. From ANY device. This is certainly not something that is happening because users are demanding it and it sure isn't going to sell any more phones. More likely, this is a reflection of two things. First, Microsoft under Ozzie is making it a higher priority to support other people's products. Second, this could help limit the chances of another lawsuit over in EU land should Silverlight get big. By providing support for Flash "Light" well ahead of the Silverlight for mobile release, Microsoft is showing that it wants to win this fight fair and square.

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  • If Adobe was Smart...

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    They would merge the Flex team and the Flash player team, and truely support things like MXML in the player. Why in the world do you need 2 entirely different ways to build applications in Flash? Why doesn't the Flash player itself understand Flex MXML? Why must Adobe's resources be split trying to build, promote, support, and refine two entirely different experiences for application developers? IMO, collapsing the teams into a single team would be the way to go with the introduction of Silverlight, especially considering that just about everyone on the Adobe side touts Flex as the real competitor to Silverlight, not the Flash IDE... yet all the big bucks are behind Flash, not Flex. It seems to be a given that the Flash IDE itself is needlessly complex and horribly inefficient when trying to do anything other than animation. With the push away from animation to more useful tasks, how can Adobe be missing this important step?

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  • Silverlight vs. Flash: The Developer Story

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    First off, let me explain my background for those of you who may not know. Way back in the day, when Flash 4 was the latest and greatest, Macromedia decided to “open up” the Flash file format. They released documentation (which was poor at best) and an SDK (which was horrible at best). I saw the potential here. Finally, the format third party developers could unleash their creativity and usher in all kinds of amazing tools. Unfortunately, the documentation was full of errors and the SDK was so riddled with bugs that you spent more time debugging it than using it. 

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  • Marc on Apollo

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    "When will Adobe/Macromedia learn? Why would someone want to lock themselves into a proprietary, closed platform - like Apollo? Unfortunately none of the (so-called) analyst, experts out there plugging Adobe - has brought this up yet. I’m not sure why they think that desktop based apps - connected to the Internet - are so new or different - or why locking yourself into an Adobe platform is smart, but both Scoble and Arrington seem to love it. One could argue that by enabling developers to easily connect media, web and the desktop together - that they’ll be able to get further faster - but would someone please mention to these poor schmucks who swallow this pitch that if you’re hopelessly locked into a proprieary platform - that the owner of the platform (Google, Microsoft, Adobe, MySpace) can do ANYTHING they want - at any time and discard you as fast as - well as fast as Macromedia ripped of Laszlo. So if history is any guidance, the ONE company who you’d NEVER trust - as far as you can throw them - is exactly the people shoveling you this Apollo crap. What open standards does Apollo support (besides http, HML and tcp/ip?) How could it have been done better - open? How many young companies have they already ripped off, stolen their IP or made promsies to - which they’ll break? I can’t believe nobody is calling them on this atrocity of a platform? Well I am. Everything Macromedia ever did to try and provide an integrated platform for developers - has failed. Why do you think Jeremy Allaire had to leave Macromedia to go do Brightcove? Well anyway - the platform sucks, stay away from it. But it gives me an excuse to use one of my favorite acronyms - YACP"

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  • Adobe Confusion

    7 Comments

    As I pointed out earlier, Adobe has just donated their action script VM to Mozilla to be used in Firefox. This is really cool. For one, the VM is supposed to provide huge performance boosts. Secondly, it will ensure that your JS code works in both Firefox and Apollo to ease the migration path. However, I have to scratch my head and ask, "Why the hell didn't they donate it to WebKit/Safari?" After all, they are writing Apollo on top of WebKit, not the Mozilla's code. It is really quite amazing to me that they are investing so much in Mozilla when they are building their own platform on top of a completely different code base. Why not just build Apollo on top of Mozilla and reap the benefits of your Mozilla improvements?

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