Page 2 - Where is FLash heading?

I think Sliverlight is aimed at it, altho M$ usually aims a notch below the hard core professional level, which Adobe pretty much owns. Still, its good competition to have M$ nipping at thelower end, and free stuff there too.

Actually competing head to head with Adobe for Photoshop would be really hard and very expensive. They do what the pros want, and so getting people to switch is not going to be easy. You'd have to be vastly better to make people even consider it seriously.


Plus if you are a professional graphics designer, the $2K or so is pocket change to a business. They typically buy fairly heavy duty workstations that cost way more than a low end PC.

As I said, I think open source software and open standards is a good thing, but the quality and certainly the quality of support of OSS varies widely.

If I want to get information on the Flash/Flex API, I know exactly where to go. It's not a manpage, or a readme file, but a complete API reference. There are tutorials and even books available as well. With OSS this is also sometimes the case other times it fits into one of a few situations with a few variations.

One: You go to the site, and there is no information, but a copy of the readme file, which is absolutely no help. You email the developer or get on their forum and never receive one reply, except perhaps from someone else in the same boat asking if you ever got the issue resolved.

Two: The developer is at least civil, but has limited knowledge outside of what they have just created. All they can do is ask you to write back if you find the solution, because they would like to know what it is too.

Three: The developer couldn't care less if you use the software at all. The attitude is usually accompanied by a general lack of respect for anyone that isn't as smart and experienced with a particular set of tools or techniques as they are (according to them). You also get comments like "It's all in the readme file" or "just recompile the kernel with all the appropriate CF flags, then edit the config file" (the unbelievably non standard cryptic one) " with the config parameters, make and install." or "Just read the source. What, you're not a c programmer? then this package probably isn't for you" (code words for you are an idiot newb stop bothering me). Some of this attitude is widespread enough that it impedes the possibility of seeing Linux or other OSS on the desktop.

I haven't heard one criticism of Adobe products in regards to quality or lack of features that couldn't be demonstrated to exist in the OSS world as well.

Silverlight is a nice try, but one of the advantages that they are touting is multiple language runtimes. The idea is to accommodate developers with a language that they have already learned.

The problems with that are, that for one, it requires the software to support all those languages. As with the CLR the idea behind the Peal 6/parrot engine is to provide that kind of flexibility and there has been talk of Parrot being used in browsers to provide more than just Javascript as a scripting language. That still isn't as slim as a well optimized VM designed for a single language.

I would also be wary of security concerns with adapting languages that are primarily server side languages, into a sandboxed browser environment.

In Flash currently, you have components and other code that were designed around AS 1 - 2 and then you have components that were designed around AS 3. Some will not work with others. There was enough benefit to moving to AS 3 that Flash/Flex developers put up with it. I don't know how Silverlight deals with such issues between different runtime languages, but I'm sure there would be limitations to using third party code, if it wasn't the same runtime language as the one your application was in.

I really don't know that it is much of an advantage. Outside of that, I haven't seen anything unique about it.

http://entertainment.slashdot.org/ Dilert goes flash
"The Dilbert.com website just got an extreme makeover. Gone is the old, rather clunky but perfectly functional, website, replaced by a Flash-heavy website that only Mordac the Preventer of Information Services could love. Users have been pretty unanimous in condemning the changes. Among the politer comments: 'Congrats. Vista is no more lonely at the top in the Competition For The Worst Upgrade In Computing Industry, this web site upgrade being a serious contender.' You have to register to leave comments, but many seem to have registered for the express purpose of panning the new design."

Odd because it has been my impression, "all Flash" web sites are frowned upon in the Flash development community as well. There are always going to be people that think it's okay, but the focus in Flash these days, among most major developers are RIA's, desktop or value added applications for sites. The same applications that we all would recommend the use of AJAX for.

I've always suggested to new coders to employ technology like that as an added value to a standard web site, with a clear purpose, alternatives to getting the same information and clearly stated system requirements. It's been my experience that most responsible Flash developers make the same recommendations.

Microsoft apparently didn't get that memo either because in an effort to push Silverlight, they are aiming to do something similar with their sites.

To me at least, you saying the following didn't sound like you were stating it as a positive thing, besides I was speaking about the general "omg it's a monopoly" mind-set, not what you said specifically:

On the one hand they may have a monopoly on the graphics industry because they produce a good all round product that covers several areas. On the other hand alot of people will choose to use it because everyone else is.

Personally I don't mind either way. My design clients can use the software to create stunning graphics which when complete I know I can open on my system at a different location and it still looks exactly as they meant it to, we're both happy. I lost count of the number of corrections I had to make when working on a Photoshop PSD file in Gimp.

I'm sure if Gimp was 100% usable with the Photoshop and Paint Shop file formats and had a more robust and straight forward set of features then more companies would use it. On the other hand a fair share of us have had to put up with management mentality of "if it's free then it's got to be crap".

Truth be told I am a big supporter of the Adobe apps. PS, Illustrator, Indesign and Flash particulary.
I have background in the printing and graphics industry and like you
say people buy the programs because everyone else uses
them and they want to support each others files.