Adobe Opens the FLV and SWF Formats 262
Wolfcat writes to tell us that Adobe announced today that they are opening the SWF and FLV formats via the Open Screen Project. "The Open Screen Project is supported by technology leaders, including Adobe, ARM, Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco, Intel, LG Electronics Inc., Marvell, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Verizon Wireless, and leading content providers, including BBC, MTV Networks, and NBC Universal, who want to deliver rich Web and video experiences, live and on-demand across a variety of devices. The Open Screen Project is working to enable a consistent runtime environment — taking advantage of Adobe Flash Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR — that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and consumer devices, including phones, mobile internet devices (MIDs), and set top boxes."
Interesting how things change (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Defence agains silverlight? (Score:3, Interesting)
Flex + Flash's ubiquity + Adobe Air = obviated operating system. It doesn't matter what OS you run if you can create a single application which runs on mobile phones, from a web browser on all major OS's, or as a desktop application on all major OS's.
It's quick and easy to create a single application which runs just about anywhere - much simpler than creating a standard desktop application. So as a developer, as long as you don't need something high-end enough to rule out Flex as a platform (ie, 3d games, etc), there's really very little reason to not currently be developing for Flex.
Microsoft knows this, Flash crept up on them and turned into a serious threat to their monopoly. They're probably really kicking themselves for having distributed it for a while, cinching the install base.
Silverlight is Microsoft's knee-jerk reaction to the realization that this sleeping giant is waking up. It's their attempt to maintain the lock-in they currently own. This is why they're now shoving Silverlight down your throat. For example, my Microsoft Office 2008 on OS X had a "Critical Update," whose description was vague, and did not contain a link to the full details. Installing it because of course that's what you do with critical updates, it turns out to have simply been an install of Silverlight, even though there was no way for me to have known this in advance.
I went to a Silverlight developer conference, and I saw Microsoft employees showing off example applications, including walking us through the creation of these applications. I can say without a doubt that Flex is substantially easier to work with; in the time and lines of code they created a simple slideshow with fading transitions that reads filenames out of a CSV, at the Adobe conference, they'd made a slideshow with thumbnails, transitions, varying timers, pause, manual navigation, and even a carousel mode, which read data from a CSV, SOAP, WSDL, or REST web service.
Like many things, Microsoft is putting just enough effort into Silverlight to make it look competitive.
FWIW, I asked during the Silverlight developer conference a few months ago what the current install base of Silverlight was, and the only response they were willing to give is, "If you don't use it, nobody will install it." That means practically nobody.
Re:More details (Score:3, Interesting)
Adobe IMO has a good reputation (ps and pdf). But there nothing about this i can find on the website. I really would like some more information about the IP issues. Without a clear statment about the IP involved it will be difficult to implement a true GPL 3 version at the least.
Re:More details (Score:3, Interesting)
Example: can I use flash (mpeg/VP6) as the movie format without paying license fees in a commercial video game? Note that no GPL code could be used of course.
Re:Interesting how things change (Score:1, Interesting)
Surly already having a product with more or less feature parity in the market makes it even easier for MS to implement this:
Once moonlight to followed suit you could have a multi-platform (yes with proper 64bit plugins) SWF player that out performed Adobe's with the full backing of the industry monopoly.
As this would simply demonstrate that Silverlight has a supper-set of Flash's functionality it would be a marketing win and fully tick the 'extend' box from day one. (Not to mention solving Silverlight's chicken and egg problem.)
Any bets on how long the 'extinguish' phase will take?
Re:JS/AS Runtimes getting absurdly fast (Score:2, Interesting)