October 18, 2005
Birds-of-a-Feather
Went to a great Birds-of-a-Feather session last night with the "XD" -- Experience Design -- group. Seems like those guys have the best jobs in all of technology. They made this crazy cool demo at the keynote of a futuristic media management tool and store, which led me to a question that I asked them.
It seems like the thing that's holding Flash back from being the best cross-platform media development product is its extremely limited format support. Right now you can play Flash Video (FLV) and MP3, but not much else. Most of the content people are buying today is in DRM'ed WMV, WMA and AAC (and the FairPlay MOV from the iTunes Music Store), and that trend is only going to grow.
What I'd like to do is to be able to write a cross-platform media player -- better than Windows Media Player, better than iTunes -- that can play anything. The inability of Flash to read anything except a very limited set of media content is going to make that virtually impossible though.
The response from the Macromedia guys was basically that it wasn't likely to happen because of licensing and technology issues, which I understand. Still, it would be a real world-beater.
Posted by Lee Clontz at 11:15 AM | Comments (0)
October 17, 2005
Max Keynote
Some really cool stuff was showed off at the Macromedia Max 2005 keynote today. Flex Builder, a tool that will let you built Flex apps without a server, seems like it'll be really cool. Anxious to try that one out. There's a new site -- http://labs.macromedia.com -- that'll let you download software alphas (download Flex 2 as we speak). They also showed off a prototype "media app of the future" that integrated all media, games, etc. on all devices with integrated shopping capabilities (of course).
Downsides? Macromedia CEO Stephen Elop took a really weird swipe at Microsoft for no good reason, showing a Windows 95-style BSOD to applause from the audience. Those kinda went away about five years ago, but whatever. Not sure that the CEO of a company that shipped Flash 7.0, which crashed many times a day, has much room to talk. And Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen showed up very awkwardly at the end and seemed kinda like a stepfather-to-be having a "I know I can't replace your Dad" kind of conversation. It was a little creepy and probably didn't set the tone he intended.
Posted by Lee Clontz at 04:27 PM | Comments (0)
Back at Max
Arrived in Anaheim yesterday for Max 2005. Good flight, good movie ("Batman Begins"), bad weather. Walked around Downtown Disney a bit, but couldn't bring myself to spend $50 for a couple of hours in the park. Everything went smoothly with checkin and this morning I'm at my first session, Advanced Actionscript 2.0. Body is a little wigged by the time change, but so far, so good.
Posted by Lee Clontz at 11:32 AM | Comments (0)
September 21, 2005
Dreamweaver 8's Autocomplete
... is just awesome. Closest thing I've seen yet to a truly killer new feature. No longer does it dump the ending tag into the document as soon as you create the starting tag. Rather, when you type </ to close a tag, it looks for the most deeply nested tag that's still opened and writes in the closing tag for it. In my experience, it's been right on the money every time. It's smart enough to look upwards in the nesting tree if everything else is already closed.
Also, it makes singleton tags like <BR> and <HR> XHTML compliant automatically. Very slick.
Posted by Lee Clontz at 03:50 PM | Comments (0)
September 19, 2005
First Impressions of Flash 8
I installed the trial version of Flash 8 and am, so far, quite impressed. The application definitely seems more capable than its creaky predecessor, although I've yet to do a project of any significance in it. I opened a few old projects and exported them and everything seems tighter.
New stuff:
- Supposedly bitmaps work much better within Flash than they used to (which is a little like saying FEMA this week is improved over two weeks ago -- the baseline is not high). It looks like there's still some nasty dot crawl on scaled JPEGs, but time will tell how much better it works. I'm not convinced yet.
- Security warnings seem much more effectively voiced. Macromedia's done a good job at making sure that Flash movies can't do anything nefarious to your system, but haven't always been very good about telling developers how to let Flash do things you would like it to do on a local system. Looks like they done some work so that when things fail, the system lets you know.
- Scalable live effects (drop shadows, blur and whatnot) work pretty well, even on bitmaps. Will be interesting to see what performance hit one sees. Moving and scaling bitmaps in Flash is usually a pretty expensive process, often pegging the processor even on small bitmaps. If you try to move more than three simultaneously, the universe reapproaches singularity.
Despite the clamor of many developers last year at Max, the beginner mode for the ActionScript editor window remains long gone. (Thanks, Chris) -- beginner mode is back, but has been moved to the "Script Assist" button in the Action window. Many will be pleased by this.- Flash now integrates with Dreamweaver 8's "sites," letting you manage them from within Flash. Not sure how useful that is, but it's there.
- New video encoding stuff. Yay! Looking forward to seeing the quality vs. the old version. There's also a QuickTime plug-in. Creating Flash video in the old days was a real PitA.
I do wish it would allow you to specify MX 2004 as the default filetype for saving. As it is now, you have to do a Save As... if you want to attain backwards file compatibility, which is stupid. If Photoshop can have a compatibility setting, so can Flash. Saving anything in the native format is an unnecessary lock-in.
More to come..
Posted by Lee Clontz at 03:50 PM | Comments (0)
Installed Dreamweaver 8
After a rather troubled experience with the Studio MX 2004 apps, Macromedia's out with the new versions of... pretty much everything. (Speaking of, does anyone else find it odd that they're able to miraculously finish the new versions of all of their software at exactly the same time? I wish they'd just release it when it's done, rather than try to attach them all to the same date.)
The MX 2004 suite had some real quality control problems which continue to this day. Flash Pro only became a usable product with 7.2. Everything prior crashed constantly under any significant load or wouldn't launch at all. Dreamweaver was similarly, if not as drastially, affected by excessive memory use. I place the blame on the ominous "Macromedia Licensing.exe" service that ran all the time, but that may not be fair.
At any rate, I'm installing the new apps now. Some initial impressions:
Dreamweaver:
- Dreamweaver seems to run a little faster (thank god), although the first time I ran it, it never finished launching. Not good. Takes about 10-12 seconds to fully bootstrap on a machine running a lot of processes. Not ideal, but probably a little better than MX 2004. Still not as fast as something like Word. We'll see how the speed in the rest of the program is.
- They've added, in Dreamweaver, a "Dual Monitor" selection for panel display. Nice idea, although I wish it was smarter. If I'm set up for "coder" view, I don't need the Code Inspector taking up most of the window. Minor gripe, but hey.
- They've fixed the problem where WebDAV passwords had to be saved in the site manager. You can now leave your Dreamweaver password blank and you'll be prompted for it. Praise be!
- File transfer dialogs are no longer modal. In other words, you can still work while the program is transferring files. That's nice.
- WebDAV transfers seem a little faster. Anecdotal, but it's something.
- One annoying bug: the "connect/disconnect plug" button in the Files menu never lights up. You seem to have to hit the 'Refresh' button to connect to your remote site. The tooltip updates to say whether you're connected or not, but the button never becomes active. Strange. If it's by design, I can't understand why.
- The "Manage Sites" interface is brain-dead. There's no way to disable site definitions you only use occasionally, or to nest them, or to sort them (say, by last-updated) or to reorder them or to do much of anything with them. This interface has been the same for the past god-knows-how-many versions of Dreamweaver and they never seem to update it.
Posted by Lee Clontz at 12:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack