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Salasaga Fills Flash Creation Hole for Linux
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Mar 24, 2008 04:47 PM
from the flash-still-evil dept.
from the flash-still-evil dept.
Linux.com's Bruce Byfield is reporting that Salasaga, the renamed Flame Project, is attempting to fill the functionality gap of Flash creation for Linux in addition to being a cross-platform tool. While it still lacks the spit-shine of more mature apps, it is going a long way to filling yet another hole in Linux software. "Opening Salasaga, you could easily think you are in a slide show program. Individual slides display on the left, and the current slide appears on the bottom right. On the top right is information about the layers on the current side. Menus are logically laid out across the top of the editing window. From the editing menu, you can set the defaults for new projects, including the default display size of finished projects, the preview width, and the default background color. After adjusting these settings, you proceed logically from the right as you develop a project, progressing from Screenshots for importation through Slide and Layer to Export. This progression is so logical that few viewers should have trouble teaching themselves the basics of the software and producing a test project in less than 20 minutes -- and saving it in native .flame format or exporting it to Flash or SVG formats."
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Link and Summary (Score:5, Informative)
On the off-chance someone was going to RTFA, here is the FA [linux.com], since it doesn't seem to have made it into the story.
The following line probably tells most people what they want to know:
Also missing are features that those familiar with Flash Professional or Adobe Captivate might expect, such as drawing tools, a scripting language, and support for sound and video.
So what does it do? Well, slideshows. Handy, but not hugely exciting.
Re:Link and Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm sure some people can do some nice stuff with this, but what I'd really like to see is decent animated SVG in an open format. Can you imagine what Inkscape [inkscape.org] would be like with support for animation? Incredible - that's what. If some rich company (Google, Sun) wants to knock FLASH flying and bring about an open standard, that would be the short route to go.
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Salasaga seems to be about authoring slide shows in SWF format. In which case, it will need to do a better job than the Export function of the Open Office Impress application.
Track Jumping (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Link and Summary (Score:5, Informative)
To me, it seems that this software would be more suited to a plugin for OpenOffice.org Impress.
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If by supporting you mean "have thrown an alpha or two over the wall for 32-bit x86 processors back in December", then yes, Adobe supports Linux with Flex.
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If by supporting you mean "have thrown an alpha or two over the wall for 32-bit x86 processors back in December", then yes, Adobe supports Linux with Flex.
Personally, I'm very happy about them releasing alphas. It's already quite usable.
Also, there's another commercial IDE [powerflasher.com], the SDK [adobe.com] itself is under the MPL, and there are alternative (non-Adobe) tools [swfmill.org] as well.
Anyway, I highly recommend haXe [haxe.org], it's a fine language that you can also use to generate JavaScript, with a great type system.
Re:Link and Summary (Score:4, Informative)
Trying to do OSS development on the Flash platform is kind of a nightmare in terms of licensing.
Re Flex, check out the EULA [adobe.com], e.g., "No Modifications, No Reverse Engineering." The swf spec [adobe.com] says "a. You may not use the Specification in any way to create or develop a runtime, client, player, executable or other program that reads or renders SWF files." If you look at the list of codecs that are supported for Flash, or that may be supported in the near future, it's a mixture of totally proprietary codecs and others that are not quite as proprietary, but are not totally free and open either: mp3, a modified version of h.263, AAC audio, H.264 video, Nelly Moser. The EULA for the player [adobe.com] says you can't modify it or reverse-engineer it, and can't run it on a portable device. As of a year ago, there were also a lot of compatibility and licensing issues with the Version 2 Components.
If you want to do totally OSS development on the flash platform, you can also do it using mtasc, haxe, and gnash. However, you then have to accept that mtasc supports an old version of actionscript, and haxe isn't the same language. I.e., you can't buy a flash book and expect to get the examples working.
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Imagine if javascript, PHP, or html was a proprietary binary blob? You see the issue I'm sure...
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Is that so? Damn, I should have read the manual.
markdavis, your comment alone was worth my visit to Slashdot today.
What about a player? (Score:5, Informative)
Does anyone in my situation have a suggestion? I've also tried broken firefox add-ons, including: Magic's Video - Downloader, Media Pirate - The Video Downloader, and Video Download. I can watch about 1/3 of youtube videos. 1/3 don't work at all, and 1/3 only show the first frame. I haven't seen one interactive flash that works. Some flash completely freezes up firefox. Maybe I'd have luck with a different browser
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No idea, but here's one tip: mplayer will play the videos.
Visit the youtube page with a broken flash implementation and it may still download the file to your browser's cache. (It does in opera). Drop to command line, launch mplayer ... yeah, okay, it sucks. But there ya go.
Re:What about a player? (Score:4, Insightful)
Epistax: "Can I have an integrated flash player that WORKS please? [...] arg please don't say contribute, I haven't the time to do anything but work and flame on slashdot"
If you don't have the time to contribute, how important is that integrated flash player for you? Contribution doesn't neccesary mean it will cost you time, contributing money (even a small sum) can be a way too. Or you could send Adobe a polite email, asking them to add support for your platform. Adobe is increasingly paying more attention to linux. A friendly reminder of lots of people helps
Epistax: "Gnash is utter crap"
There are people on projects like Gnash, GPLFlash player, etc who tried or still trying to solve your problem. It's not easy to build an open source flash player. It takes a lot of effort from people with very busy lifes who make the time to contribute code. If all open source developers had your attitude, we all wouldn't even have something like a amd64 open source distribution. So please don't say open source x or y is utter crap, but you don't have time to contribute.
Parent
Re:What about a player? (Score:4, Informative)
If all open source developers had your attitude, we all wouldn't even have something like a amd64 open source distribution.
I'm not an open source developer, so that's not a fair comparison. I actually did try to help out in a few before but found the politics to be distasteful. My comment about gnash wasn't fair. Gnash is the best thing I've found for amd64. However, it doesn't deserve the pedestal that I've seen people put it on.
Again, my apologies to any gnash developers. It's just not usable yet.
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Like any sensible person, I don't install Flash. As for Youtube, youtube-dl [arrakis.es] works quite well.
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Re:What about a player? (Score:4, Informative)
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So what does it do? Well, slideshows. Handy, but not hugely exciting
Not only that, OpenOffice can already export slideshows into .swf files. When .swf support was first added I thought it was so neat I went and created a short animation - flipbook style. As it turns out, OO.org requires you to click, to advance to the next slide - which is the only added feature of salasaga AFAICT.
From the project homepage
An Integrated Development Environment for producing eLearning. Imagine a free, easy to use GUI authoring environment that helps you create visually impressive and actually useful learning material. The short term goal for this project is to provide such an environment, and we're well on the way to a first release for doing that.
To me, this seems to suggest this is designed as an educational tool, not a linux flash replacement. But it fails to show (at least to me) why it is any better t
Re:Link and Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, the hype comes from Slashdot, the linux.com article is quite restrained...
Parent
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The link? (Score:5, Funny)
can't comment.. (Score:5, Funny)
Which hole is this filling? (Score:2)
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Oh, THAT kind of flash (Score:3, Informative)
I never noticed that Linux had a problem in that regard.
Other Options...? (Score:3, Interesting)
Misread (Score:4, Funny)
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Flash is not essential (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Here is the truth... (Score:5, Informative)
Face it, no OS has much to offer to the inexperienced user. The question is, how much does it take to become an experienced user? Or how much does the OS get in your way if you're inexperienced?
Been doing this for years.
Simple: Treat the distribution as an OS. If it doesn't have a native package for Ubuntu, then as a novice user, assume it doesn't support Ubuntu.
Now, I dare you to find a slicker way to install and maintain programs than Synaptic.
Oh please:
And there's a GUI for that, too, if you need it. I think it prompts you on first boot now.
Except he can -- again, absurdly simple to enable. First time you click on an MP3, you'll get a prompt that'll guide you through installing the necessary packages.
You're not even trying, are you?
Worst case? Tell them to install a 32-bit OS. Not as if they'd be worse off than in Windows.
Again, only a few clicks away. And once they're installed, they'll actually auto-update, and stay updated.
Believe it or not, installing XP on this laptop was worse -- tried downloading the drivers from nvidia.com, and they didn't work. The Toshiba site only had Vista drivers. Had to go to an old Toshiba UK site to find any. On Linux? Damned-near plug'n'play.
And then you go on to list a few apps that you don't like, but which do, indeed, prove that these things exist. Oh, and Maya has a Linux port.
Rails.
Which also can only be used reasonably on a machine with 2 gigs of RAM. May as well use Eclipse.
For business-level, maybe not. Personal-level, there's Gnucash and KMyMoney.
Dell does.
Literally plugged a webcam into a vanilla Kubuntu, had it running in Kopete with no tweaking whatsoever.
And at that point, you descend completely into a pointless rant, that makes me wonder exactly what Linux people you've been hanging out with -- if, indeed, you know anything about Linux at all. You make some good points, but you lose all credibility when you rant about problems that were fixed 2+ years ago, or actually complain about things that Linux does better than Windows.
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What a ridiculous dismissal. There are real differences between platforms when it comes to usability for the inexperienced. Saying that an inexperienced user can't get value out of ANY platform is just arguing language instead of the issue.
It's a shame that you worked so hard to put together good arguments otherw
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Figured Vista hadn't been out long enough for this to be really ancient.
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Re:Here is the truth... (Score:4, Interesting)
I had Windows NT4, FreeBSD, BeOS, and Rhapsody DR1 running on the same PC.
It's not that bloody hard.
Hell, I had Windows 2000, FreeBSD, and BSD running on a Toshiba Libretto. That puppy was maxed out with 64M RAM.
IT'S NOT THAT HARD, except that Microsoft deliberately makes it harder than it needs to be.
The way I see it, it's good that we have a mostly homogeneous OS market.
Well, except for Windows, we do. Pretty much everything else is UNIX.
As for Microsoft, I wouldn't mind them so much being an evil empire if they were a competent evil empire. But it's over 10 years now and they STILL haven't fixed the whole IE / ActiveX security mess.
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[erratum] (Score:2)
That should read "I had Windows 2000, FreeBSD, and BeOS running on a Toshiba Libretto."
Pardon me.
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In fact, whenever XP crashes and I reboot so I can go back to gaming (including in Flash, see, I'm on-topic) I boot it through a GRUB menu. Works great, and only adds about 1.5s to my boot time, virtually all of which is me pressing the down key.