At its annual MAX user conference, Adobe puts on the dog and serves up new tooling and other support for Flash. Adobe introduces Flex Builder Gumbo, Flash Catalyst – formerly known as Thermo, the availability of Adobe AIR 1.5 and a pre-release of the 64-bit Linux version of Adobe Flash Player 10. Adobe also opens up its cloud initiative, known as Cocomo, as a public beta.
A real adance would be fully opensource flash or just no flash at all.
(the fact that the specs are supposedly available doesn’t seem to be enough, seeing how gnash performs (didn’t try swfdec, and both are not as portable as they should really be anyway), besides this doesn’t extend to the codecs used for youtube-like applications, like VP6…)
Sorry to sound harsh, but flash just doesn’t work here. And in XP I had to remove it due to perf reasons:
http://revolf.free.fr/img/why_I_banned_flash.png
or rather, try to remove it as Yahoo Msgr installed it back without asking…
On Linux it’s not that much better:
http://revolf.free.fr/img/why_flash_sux_even_on_linux.png
It’s a bit of a leap to suggest the specs are useless based on Gnash’s performance. The Flash documentation was only released 6 or 7 months ago whereas Gnash has been in development for years.
However, I’d like to see the open-sourcing effort move quicker. The success of Photoshop was built on open, or at least ubiquitous, formats so Adobe could only gain by opening Flash and selling stacks more of the authoring tools.
I can only guess at what’s making them cautious. I don’t believe that it’s due to licensing. Adobe may worry that it would impair their ability to incorporate new features quickly and get them out to as many end-users as possible. That’s not been a problem for PDF, but then, I myself use Apple’s Preview rather than the Acrobat Reader.
They may worry that Microsoft would move to make their Expression tools compatible with Flash and win over developers. Yes, Microsoft were prevented from muddying Java with their own virtual machine, but with open standards like HTML, they’ve been free to manipulate them for years without legal comeback. They even got a format through the ISO without actually following the specs themselves. One thing’s for sure – Microsoft would respond. The better news is that Silverlight is just one piece of a much larger strategy for Microsoft and they undermine that strategy by endorsing anything else.
I think it’s a risk worth taking as it’s obviously what Adobe’s target audience (developers) want, and I don’t know if AIR will succeed without it.
A very good article. The Flash / Flex platform is creating a very good offer for cross-OS development.
As long as you don’t cross onto 64 bit windows. As a consumer, if given a choice between a desktop app written in flash or almost anything else, I’d choose anything else — even Java!
Right. But I suspect release of 64bit Flash rushed for Linux and slowed for Windows is aimed to weaken Windows / .NET / Silverlight stack. And, btw, that’s my stack of choice as that’s a great platform. Just, it’s less portable than Flash.
Note: you can run 32bit Flash on 64bit Windows too.
You can run 32-bit Flash on 64-bit Linux the same way you can run it on Windows x64 – just put it in a 32-bit browser (if you run Flash in Windows x64, you are running a 32-bit browser).
Additionally, on Linux you can use a plugin wrapper to run the 32-bit player in a 64-bit browser. That’s the default for Ubuntu, and despite all the whining, it actually works pretty well.
I’d also bet Adobe released the 64-bit version for dual purposes – curb the whining (seriously, it’s annoying), and to get some initial deployment testing from a crowd that would probably not mind doing a bit of testing with an unstable or at least less tested code base.
Never meant to say that you cannot run 32bit Flash on Linux.
Also, don’t think Flash 64bit needs much debugging or testing as the code base can be roughly the same. I believe 64bit will affect performance as you have to deal with slower processing. But optimizing can be done and of course 64bit processing would allow Flash to deal with larger resources and, once optimized, better results.
I still believe Adobe is trying to harm Windows in a world where Flash is still dominant, even if Silverlight is gaining traction. I don’t think it’s a chance that Windows and OS X has been left out (i.e. basically the whole installed desktop base, which is what Flash is aimed to…): I believe it’s because of Silverlight (Win) and Apple refusing to ship Flash on iPhone (OS X). We’ll see what happens.
That may have been a strategic consideration. Adobe while developing apps on Windows, is certainly a competitor to Microsoft in many ways.
I’m not sure I buy that they are specifically leaving out the player for Windows or Mac though, as far as I know there are no 64-bit mac browsers, and while Vista ships with a 64-bit version of IE, it’s tucked away for safe keeping, and there is no 64-bit build of Firefox on their site.
IDK, just seems like all the demand for a 64-bit version of Flash Player is coming from the Linux guys, so it just makes sense to release it there first, and Adobe does seem to be serious about working with the open source community, especially with Flex – and other truly open source runtime libraries (even if the player is still mostly closed source). 🙂