Contents tagged with Flash

  • Silverlight Forcing Macromedia to Rethink

    4 Comments

    Many Flash developers have been complaining about the choice of On2's codec over a standard like H.264 for years. Interestingly, Adobe is finally adding support for some standard video codecs in the next version of Flash. The question is, how much did Silverlight have to do with this decision? The timing sure makes it seem like a reactive decision. In any case, it's good news for video on the web.

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  • Flash: Now Slowing Down Your Multi-Core PC

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    "As I mentioned in Flash Player Update 3 we finally realized that multi-core CPUs are here to stay. So why not follow the times and take advantage of it? As most of you hard core Flash developers know, rendering is a huge bottleneck. I've seen a couple of blog post complaining that their second core/CPU is  not doing anything when they run the Flash Player. Well people, this is about to change in this update." [1]

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  • Java FX: Sun Wants a Piece

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    "The demand continues to grow for secure, interactive content, applications, and services that run on a variety of clients. To simplify and speed the creation and deployment of high-impact content for a wide range of devices, Sun is introducing JavaFX, a new family of products based on Java technology designed to enable consistent user experiences, from desktop to mobile device to set-top box to Blu-ray Disc."

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  • If Adobe was Smart...

    2 Comments

    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

    311 Comments

    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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  • Adobe Confusion

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    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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