I’ve been watching the large number of blog links regarding the news from Adobe labs that Flash Catalyst is now in public Beta; naturally I had to download and have a go myself.
My first impressions are not good.
It seems like they’ve decided to invent their own usability best practices for the tool shortcuts. Where the hell is the pan tool? Why doesn’t holding the space bar and then using the mouse to scroll perform a pan? Keyboard shortcuts for delete don’t seem to work in the layers panel. Where is the align panel? Do I really have to right click an asset and select an align option from a dropdown? It’s a real mouseathon in the program at the moment. These aren’t really things I see as Beta related, they should just be in the app - which they are in any other CS4 product, so I’m mystified how these issues got through QA to this stage.
Probably the biggest issue is the speed (or lack thereof) of the program. Trying to edit a button’s state is painfully slow. I’m not sure whether this is to do with my system (dual core 2.4Ghz with 4Gb RAM on Vista) but I’d like to know if I’m the only one who thinks the program runs painfully slowly.
Aside from the usability and productivity issues I’m still at a loss as to why the CS4 core wasn’t used for this (or was it?) and even why we need a further dilution of the Flash product base. Surely Flash CS could be re badged as Flash Designer and the Catalyst toolset integrated (I realise I made that sound easier than it would be, but as it stands the introduction of this third tool looks like more of a money grab than anything else). This would go nicely alongside the newly re badged Flash Builder (which incidentally looks very good, so kudos to the Flex team).
I haven’t upgraded to CS4 as yet, and it’s for some of the reasons above that I haven’t. I just don’t know where the Flash products are headed, and quite frankly if this is where they’re going I may jump ship completely onto HMS Flex and let the “designers” out there handle getting the assets I’m after into a state in which I can use them. Though the right side of my brain may have something to say about that statement…
Following on from my earlier post regarding Google Maps and Flex, I’ve put together a new example which I reckon’s pretty nifty.
Somehow my idea was spawned by Andrew Shorten’s post which discussed using Google Maps and the new Adobe Cocomo service to create a collaborative mapping application. And I say somehow, as I’m not really sure how I went off on the tangent of geo-locating IP addresses when the original post was about two users drawing stuff on a shared map! Maybe they can see where each other is on the map and start drawing a line until they meet somewhere in the middle…
Anyway, (il)logic aside here’s the example I whipped up:
View source is enabled in the following example.
The “Geo-locate IP address” text field should auto populate with your current IP address. The initial map will load and center on London.
When coding up the infowindow that displays, I found this reference on the Google site very useful - http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/flash/reference.html
The actual information is coming from a whopping great big file that I’ve uploaded to my server which was supplied by Maxmind. There’s a few other databases that they supply, so I might add some more features to this example down the track. And they have pay for use and free versions of all their data, which is great!
I’m a bit late on this one I know (had it in my todo’s to blog about it back when Max US was on) but Adobe have created a very cool Groups website to promote and manage the hundreds of different user groups around the world that deal with Adobe technology.
Here’s my beloved South Oz group (G’day Steven ;-)
The number of groups in London is still a bit thin on the ground, or am I not searching for the right keywords…?
And I love the welcome message, should just about cover everyone I reckon!
Will be interesting to see what comes of the community over the next few months and just how useful the site will be for networking purposes. Hopefully everyone that attends User Group meetings will be encouraged to go onto the Groups site and register as a member of their group (and any other ones they might be interested in). As a bit of a working nomad at the moment that should make it easier to network with your next port of call before even arriving there.
I just checked out the latest Flash Player release candidate and was interested to see that the file size of the Mac and Linux versions are over 5.45Mb and 3.8Mb respectively. The PC version is still under 2Mb (which is very small for what it’s now capable of).
That got me to thinking about a few things. What were the average player sizes for the last few Flash Player releases? This led me to the Flash Player Archive page on the Adobe site. I downloaded the Flash 7, 8 and 9 archives and got to knocking up a quick average of the player sizes. Rather strangely there’s Linux releases in the Flash 7 archive but none in the Flash 8 archive (which I later discovered was due to there being no Flash Player 8 for linux per se as they went straight to 8.5)
Here’s the rough figures:
Note: I’m using the .zip, .exe, .hqx, .dmg or .tar.gz size not the actual size of the player inside the archive. Obviously this isn’t terribly scientific but I wanted to get a general guide to the increase in size of the actual single file end users have to download to install a player.
|
|
Flash 7 |
Flash 8 |
Flash 9 |
Flash 10 |
|
ActiveX
|
0.75Mb* |
0.83Mb |
1.33Mb |
1.80Mb |
|
Plugin
|
0.69Mb |
0.95Mb |
1.43Mb |
1.76Mb |
|
Mac OS X
|
1.68Mb (PowerPC) |
1.42Mb (PowerPC) |
2.10Mb |
5.45Mb |
|
Linux
|
1.00Mb |
no stats available |
2.83Mb |
3.78Mb |
* There was a 300Kb decrease in size from the initial release to the final release of this version of the Player
So that brings up a few questions. Why is the Flash Player 10 Mac release so much bigger than the Flash Player 9 one? Is there a lot more code optimisation still to do for this release?
The Linux version also seems to be getting bigger relative to the PC version. Is this because the PC version can utilise functionality already available to it in Windows, or…?
Is there a magical size that if the Flash Player were to exceed, users would be less inclined to download it? Or even if the Player was 10Mb it would still have the same penetration it currently enjoys?
Lots of things to ponder, and comments to make!
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