Salasaga Fills Flash Creation Hole for Linux

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."

Other Options...?

[wasbridge]

Salasaga is cool, but I am not totally sure that it fills the Linux community's need for a Flash IDE, though it does do a good job of creating web based interactive learning environments. I do not want to steal the light, but I want to get a word in. I have a more traditional (Open Source GPL) Flash IDE project which is based off of the Open Source Flex SDK. Its in C# .NET and via MonoDevelop, Cairo and GTK+ will port well to linux and OSX. Porting is on my list of TODOs for the next 2 weeks. Check it out at http://dialect.openmodeling.net./ [dialect.openmodeling.net]

Re:Here is the truth...

[argent]

Ever try to install Windows alongside an existing OS?

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.

Re:Link and Summary

[mjbkinx]

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

[h4rm0ny]

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.

Is there an FOSS equivalent to Flash?

[AP31R0N]

It would be nice to have an open standard that allows people to create animated crap that doesn't require slurping from the adobe teat. Something any browser could run, with, or maybe even without a plugin.