Macromedia: More FUD About SVG

Robin Berjon writes "Macromedia recently announced that its latest version of Flash Lite (a limited Flash for mobile devices) was to support SVG Tiny 1.1, and support it fully (though no one has yet been able to verify that assertion). For a moment, the Web community wondered if they might be playing nice at last, after yielding to massive pressure from the mobile market to support W3C and 3GPP standards, or if they simply meant to use SVG as a trojan to get Flash into mobile devices. An article freshly published on Macromedia's web site clearly makes the case that they're after the latter, speading as much FUD as possible along the way. Thankfully, Antoine Quint decided to respond in a brief O'Reilly Net article in which he debunks Macromedia's marketing lies one by one, and expands on the wondrous features of SVG Tiny 1.1 and the shortly upcoming SVG Tiny 1.2 that make people drool before their mobile phones. "

Ah Yes

[cubicledrone]

Summary:

"Macromedia must be lying because they make Flash and we all hate Flash because someone used it for a banner ad."

No matter what play on words and rewrite of definitions Macromedia folks can come up with, Flash Lite is not standard.

Macromedia Flash is standard, whether "Flash Lite" is or isn't. There are thousands of Flash developers and hundreds of millions of Flash player installations. Flash MX managed to accomplish what no other platform has: cross-platform web multimedia with a WORKING AUTHORING APPLICATION and a WORKING PLAYER at the SAME TIME.

Just because Macromedia is making money doesn't make everything they say FUD. They make the best web development tools in the business, period. They don't have to support open standards, but they are supporting SVG, and Fireworks+Flash have the best commercial support for PNG on the market. These are good things(tm). The anti-Macromedia-because-they-make-Flash thing is getting REALLY old.

Re:Flash Forms - not just obnoxious animations

[fiannaFailMan]

You're wasting your time, mate. Have a look in my journal and see the ignorance that abounds on /. about Flash. Of course it has moved on, hell I can't even remember the last time I saw a flash splashscreen on a website, but most people here just don't want to know. As far as they're concerned, it's not open source therefore it must be evil. (Unless it's Apple of course.)

For the Acronym Impaired

[GreenHairedDave]

From the Jargon Dictionary: "FUD /fuhd/ n. Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company: "FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products." The idea, of course, was to persuade them to go with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors' equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally accomplished by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors' equipment or software. See IBM [astrian.net]. After 1990 the term FUD was associated increasingly frequently with Microsoft [astrian.net], and has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon."

I just thought I'd share, since when I read the article I thought WTF is FUD?

Mobile phones that run Linux

[timothy]

"I defy you to show be ONE SINGLE PHONE in existence that runs on Open Source software; phone makers seem to be pretty happy with using whatever will get the job done, without getting all religious about this."

Here's a page that lists several such phones [linuxdevices.com], in various stages of availability from Now to In-Development.

Re: the "Flash is evil" meme, well, I don't find it evil. I just like graphics formats (including creation tools) to have at least some free / open-source equivalent, so there's some chance of it being supported on all-free/Free platforms. Mileage obviously varies. If I could view Flash, and create (even if awkwardly) Flash presenations using all Free software, then I certainly wouldn't begrudge Macromedia making lots of money selling their source-secret versionto people who liked Macromedia's interface best. More power to you.

Flash can be used well or annoyingly, all up to the designer; it's a shame though that many sites rely on it at the expense of those who for various reasons don't want to need Flash.

(I could well be wrong; are there yet any working, Free tools for creating Flash presentations?)

timothy

That "Rebuttal" misses the point

[Pausanias]

Pop-ups and pop-unders can be easily cured by Mozilla [mozilla.org] or other popup blockers without having to give up javascript. Java can be turned on and off easily via a preference pane.

But what about Flash? For the users who hate 90% of Flash content (ads) but are very interested in 10% of it (for example, New York Times multimedia presentations), there is no easy solution. No preference pane that allows you to turn it on and off quickly. Luckily the Mozilla's flashblock [mozdev.org] can take care of this problem, but IE users are stuck with tons of undesired content.

Re:NIV

[obi]

I don't agree. They've often tried to use existing languages/techniques for flash. Examples: they were probably one of the first to use the new ecmascript 4 in a major product. They could've rolled their own language, but they picked something familiar, and kept up to date with it. I hear the format they use for Flex is based on Mozilla's XUL. And their Flash VM (the plugin) is really quite good.

Now, as someone who has to use the tools quite often, I absolutely HATE Flash MX. It's buggy, bloated, the code editor sucks, FLA files aren't really portable, it crashes often, and it slows you down all the time (crap usability).

I wish I had a compiler that would take some XML files for graphics (a subset of SVG maybe?) and some .as files, and would generate an SWF.

Flex is a bit like that, but it's not exactly there yet. And it's incredibly expensive.

Re:Who Needs Flash?

[88NoSoup4U88]

"Microscopic text (zoom is worthless here, fixed size page layout) and irritating animation is supposed to be an example of good use of Flash?"

Irritating animation , nope, that's no good example of Flash : Trying to add to one's experience of going to a certain website (for instance , a game site) is better achieved with Flash, than with a clean html site with some cool MIDI song underneath it :P

"The text also can't be copied and pasted"

Depends on what kind of text the designer uses : It is perfectly possible to have text selections within Flash documents.

"Web pages are not supposed to look the same in all browsers"

Ohwait, now we -aren't- looking for uniformity in browsers anymore ? What did I miss ?

", and individual pages within the Flash can't be bookmarked"

Again, this would be a design choice of the webdesigner.

"This site only illustrates why Flash sucks so bad."

Then why haven't you started using some sort of Flashblock extension yet ?