This is absolute Gold!
Bravo to those that created it; you’ve made some very salient points with the examples and comparisons given.
Now we just need to ensure that the same number of people (including Managers and tech decision makers) that read the dribble Apple’s CEO posted a few months back could see and experience this site. And hopefully they can if the Flash community band together with the aim of setting the facts straight.
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…
Not one to start rumours, but this comment from Lee Brimolow over at Keith Peters blog seems to suggest (or my reading between the lines is shocking) that there will be a revised naming strategy for the upcoming release of Flex Builder (currently code named Gumbo).
Anyone want to have a stab at what it could be?
We have Flash CS4 and Flash Catalyst - what’s going to be the third arm of the axis of fevil?
If it was to change, there’s going to be a lot of rebranding to do that’s for sure!
(obviously Lee’s comments are completely unsubstantiated at this time - though the post he commented on did have a few contributions regarding the inconsistency of the Flex name and how it relates to the Flash Universe Platform.)
Edit: Looks like Ryan Stewart has poo poo’d the idea of any Flex name changes.
Seems we’ve come a long way from the days of Flashkit users (ahh the memories ;-) asking whether Flash can be connected to a database. Now the questions is more likely to be what can’t Flash be connected to!
The formalisation of the Flash Platform helps to answer the later question, and to be honest there’s not a lot it can’t be connected to according to this image!
This is just one of the many things to have come out of the MAX conference thus far. Looks like the marketing/corporate relations team has had they’re work cut out for them, issuing 8 separate press releases yesterday!
I’m off to read about what else has been going on at MAX…
A few years back I worked on a project that used the Google Maps API and at the time I was charged with recommending to the client whether to use Flash or Javascript/HTML to get the job done. At the time there was no readily accessible Flash API for Google maps, and I wasn’t that keen to go with the Yahoo or Microsoft offerings (though Yahoo now has a very robust Flash API, the Microsoft (surprise surprise) one doesn’t… though I found this Silverlight version). FYI the Kaurna Place Names site was developed to identify and map places with Kaurna (Aboriginal) names and to encourage the use and increase knowledge of these names. It begins with names in southern Kaurna country (which is the region of Australia where I’m from).
So there’s the back story. I recently came across a post which talked about the Google Maps API now being available for Flash AS3. With my current push to learn about Flex I was also pleased to see that there were components available that you could just drop into your MXML and whamo, insta-map!
Here’s what I pieced together, hopefully it illustrates what can be done with a few Flex components and the Maps code provided from the Google Maps developer site.
View source is enabled in the following example.
Obviously it’s not a scratch on Paul Neave’s venerable Flash Earth, but then this example only took 15 minutes to knock together ;-)
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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