[podtech content=http://media1.podtech.net/media/2007/04/PID_011045/Podtech_Adobe_Flex_Announcement_interv.flv&postURL=http://www.podtech.net/home/scobleshow/2826/breaking-news-adobe-flash-flex-goes-open-sourc&totalTime=1525000&breadcrumb=98439cdf-6f55-4eba-a454-69a11a504168]
This morning I met with several members of the Adobe Flex team.
Official News on Adobe’s Site about Flex going Open Source.
I have two videos of our conversation:
1. Video of our conversation this morning.
2. Architecture overview (video) and more depth on just what pieces have been open sourced.
What does this mean?
Adobe is firing its guns in the Microsoft Silverlight vs. Flash war.
Developers win.
[podtech content=http://media1.podtech.net/media/2007/04/PID_011047/Podtech_Adobe_Flex_Announcement_Whiteb.flv&postURL=http://www.podtech.net/home/scobleshow/2827/the-architecture-of-flash&totalTime=1773000&breadcrumb=98439cdf-6f55-4eba-a454-69a11a504168]
Scobleizer 
I KNEW IT!!!
How manuy of you said that? 🙂
Congratulations, Adobe!!!
Rocky
Scoble Show Editor
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I KNEW IT!!!
How manuy of you said that? 🙂
Congratulations, Adobe!!!
Rocky
Scoble Show Editor
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Adobe must be very scared of Silverlight.
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Adobe must be very scared of Silverlight.
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I didn’t! But I’ll send Redmond a MPC.
Is the dev. tool open as well?
-wayne
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I didn’t! But I’ll send Redmond a MPC.
Is the dev. tool open as well?
-wayne
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Why not, it worked for Netscape
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Why not, it worked for Netscape
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It definitely stole the thunder from MIX.
Guess what the hottest topic at MIX?
“Is Microsoft going to open source Silverlight too?”
I guess it doesn’t take an Einstein to answer the question?
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It definitely stole the thunder from MIX.
Guess what the hottest topic at MIX?
“Is Microsoft going to open source Silverlight too?”
I guess it doesn’t take an Einstein to answer the question?
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http://osflash.org/red5
OMG, They open sourced their expensive media server!
They are so nice.
/sbin/service red5d start !
No more licensing fees for me!
Tanx Adobe! UR the best.
At first I thought it was to shift the cost back to the media server, which Flex and flash can’t live w/o, but now I realize it was all for the good of FOSS.
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http://osflash.org/red5
OMG, They open sourced their expensive media server!
They are so nice.
/sbin/service red5d start !
No more licensing fees for me!
Tanx Adobe! UR the best.
At first I thought it was to shift the cost back to the media server, which Flex and flash can’t live w/o, but now I realize it was all for the good of FOSS.
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Isaac: like I said. I have a front row seat to two multi-billion-dollar companies firing their big guns at each other.
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Isaac: like I said. I have a front row seat to two multi-billion-dollar companies firing their big guns at each other.
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LOL. I like gun battles where mega-corporations suffer and people live- for awhile anyway.
-wayne
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LOL. I like gun battles where mega-corporations suffer and people live- for awhile anyway.
-wayne
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Adobe wants competition, while Microsoft tries to stifle it~
Adobe wants the platform to be successful, Microsoft wants the platform to make money.
What staggering difference!
And most horribly, even if MS tries to open source it, it can’t, since it’s so deeply entrenched with rest of the MS products.
I guess, the biggest question at MIX will be, why would people develop and pay for the license of a new/untested product, while there’s a free product that is already dominant and embraced?
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Adobe wants competition, while Microsoft tries to stifle it~
Adobe wants the platform to be successful, Microsoft wants the platform to make money.
What staggering difference!
And most horribly, even if MS tries to open source it, it can’t, since it’s so deeply entrenched with rest of the MS products.
I guess, the biggest question at MIX will be, why would people develop and pay for the license of a new/untested product, while there’s a free product that is already dominant and embraced?
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>Is the dev. tool open as well?
The command line compiler is also open sourced. The eclipse based IDE is not.
More info here:
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flex_Open_Source_FAQ
mike chambers
mesh@adobe.com
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>Is the dev. tool open as well?
The command line compiler is also open sourced. The eclipse based IDE is not.
More info here:
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flex_Open_Source_FAQ
mike chambers
mesh@adobe.com
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I’m not sure if the socket stuff is in the SDK, but if so, it should make reverse engineering a media server extremely easy this time. Normally it’s a painstaking process that requires sitting and sifting through TCP dumps on ethereal, or should I say Wireshark.
With the client as MPL and a new GPL server, the FOSS community should be able to ax the pay licensing completely.
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I’m not sure if the socket stuff is in the SDK, but if so, it should make reverse engineering a media server extremely easy this time. Normally it’s a painstaking process that requires sitting and sifting through TCP dumps on ethereal, or should I say Wireshark.
With the client as MPL and a new GPL server, the FOSS community should be able to ax the pay licensing completely.
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Adobe is really running scared right now. Next week is going to be fun to watch.
This isn’t as big an announcement as your post makes it sound though. They aren’t open sourcing the Flash player engine. This is just the flex SDK libraries that run on top. This was already free, and you could already see these source (the source is already shipped with the SDK).
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Adobe is really running scared right now. Next week is going to be fun to watch.
This isn’t as big an announcement as your post makes it sound though. They aren’t open sourcing the Flash player engine. This is just the flex SDK libraries that run on top. This was already free, and you could already see these source (the source is already shipped with the SDK).
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Robert: just curious. since you probably taped this AFTER the Silverlight announcement, why didn’t you ask about Silverlight? Or you deliberately skipped that to add more mystery to your video 😉 ?
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Robert: just curious. since you probably taped this AFTER the Silverlight announcement, why didn’t you ask about Silverlight? Or you deliberately skipped that to add more mystery to your video 😉 ?
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Joe: interesting reaction.
But, yes, you’re right, next week is going to be fun at Mix too. Microsoft has a better system and tooling: if you’re on Windows. Adobe is way ahead in market adoption all over the place. Will Yahoo Maps switch to Silverlight? Will Google’s Finance site switch to Silverlight? Will startups like Scrapblog (which is mondo cool) switch to Silverlight?
Why/why not?
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Joe: interesting reaction.
But, yes, you’re right, next week is going to be fun at Mix too. Microsoft has a better system and tooling: if you’re on Windows. Adobe is way ahead in market adoption all over the place. Will Yahoo Maps switch to Silverlight? Will Google’s Finance site switch to Silverlight? Will startups like Scrapblog (which is mondo cool) switch to Silverlight?
Why/why not?
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Isaac: I filmed that this morning.
Why not ask Adobe about Microsoft? Cause that’s Microsoft’s job next week at Mix.
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Isaac: I filmed that this morning.
Why not ask Adobe about Microsoft? Cause that’s Microsoft’s job next week at Mix.
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@15
“They aren’t open sourcing the Flash player engine.”
I wasn’t sure. Back to wireshark we go.
Compiled Action script is only a resource in a flash file.
So that’s actually very insignificant.
If the socket routines and engine are still binary only, even for Linux, I don’t see what this announcement is really about.
I know that is actually C and assembly code optimized for x86, and not java, because the Linux flash developer blogs about it constantly.
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@15
“They aren’t open sourcing the Flash player engine.”
I wasn’t sure. Back to wireshark we go.
Compiled Action script is only a resource in a flash file.
So that’s actually very insignificant.
If the socket routines and engine are still binary only, even for Linux, I don’t see what this announcement is really about.
I know that is actually C and assembly code optimized for x86, and not java, because the Linux flash developer blogs about it constantly.
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http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/
Yeah, there it is. He was constantly getting digged before Flash 9 linux was released, and he couldn’t stop bitching about the inline assembly on Linux, because it’s the AT&T mnemonics instead of the intel ones. So he couldn’t paste them over from the windows build. Java classes indeed.
What a disappointment.
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http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/
Yeah, there it is. He was constantly getting digged before Flash 9 linux was released, and he couldn’t stop bitching about the inline assembly on Linux, because it’s the AT&T mnemonics instead of the intel ones. So he couldn’t paste them over from the windows build. Java classes indeed.
What a disappointment.
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Joe: well why it’s big? Not that people everywhere will be liberated from the tyranny, but the fact that it 1. ABSOLUTELY stole the thunders from Silverlight(the timing is quite deliberate) and have 2. the chance to change the way we develop software for the next 10 years.
Today everyone learns Java. Now maybe for the next ten years, people will be learning to program in Flex/ActionScript.
I guess, maybe it’s the NBL that steve yegge talked about? (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.html)
Just pure speculation 🙂
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Joe: well why it’s big? Not that people everywhere will be liberated from the tyranny, but the fact that it 1. ABSOLUTELY stole the thunders from Silverlight(the timing is quite deliberate) and have 2. the chance to change the way we develop software for the next 10 years.
Today everyone learns Java. Now maybe for the next ten years, people will be learning to program in Flex/ActionScript.
I guess, maybe it’s the NBL that steve yegge talked about? (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.html)
Just pure speculation 🙂
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Robert – I’m not sure you understand the difference between Flash and Flex.
Flash has been a huge success (especially in video).
Flex has been had a mediocre track record at best. The download size and performance of applications built with Flex is terrible (you’ll have a 150k download size for a “hello world” application built with Flex – bigger apps can be almost 1MB!!!).
Flex has had its butt kicked by AJAX the last 2 years largely because of performance and download size. The fact that they are on their third release and can only name a few sites using it isn’t something they should be boasting about.
This announcement (especially the fact that they aren’t shipping it for a few more months) smacks of desperation as opposed to some genius move…
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Robert – I’m not sure you understand the difference between Flash and Flex.
Flash has been a huge success (especially in video).
Flex has been had a mediocre track record at best. The download size and performance of applications built with Flex is terrible (you’ll have a 150k download size for a “hello world” application built with Flex – bigger apps can be almost 1MB!!!).
Flex has had its butt kicked by AJAX the last 2 years largely because of performance and download size. The fact that they are on their third release and can only name a few sites using it isn’t something they should be boasting about.
This announcement (especially the fact that they aren’t shipping it for a few more months) smacks of desperation as opposed to some genius move…
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Adobe is taking the mantra from Sun. If you can’t sell it, open source it. At least some free geeks will maintain it. And the goodwill doesn’t hurt.
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Adobe is taking the mantra from Sun. If you can’t sell it, open source it. At least some free geeks will maintain it. And the goodwill doesn’t hurt.
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“including the Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers, the ActionScript debugger, and the ActionScript libraries that make up the core Flex frameworkincluding the Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers”
@22,
I don’t even use flex and I understand what it is from this description. Flex is just a library for action script functions. They are releasing a Java action script compiler. I know compilers, and I know java isn’t a good choice for one.
But ok, they are releasing the action script compiler and debugger source and some class library for AS.
That’s only going to help those who use FLEX and want to poke into the libraries in the same way MFC source code was included with VC++ and the same way the .NET source libraries are included, and the java libraries with the sun JRE.
This is no big deal. This is not the actual runtime for flash. This will not get flash into FOSS stuff like Linux distros and let people develop FOSS tools to edit flash movies.
This is just like the Microsoft shared source for their “Open source” initiatives. Every bit as much of a token gesture the way I see it.
I think what this announcement is actually *implying* in it’s importance would be this: http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
and this: http://osflash.org/red5
I think Adobe wants people to believe that their announcement is on that scale, but is actually just a class library and the AS compiler, written in Java.
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“including the Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers, the ActionScript debugger, and the ActionScript libraries that make up the core Flex frameworkincluding the Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers”
@22,
I don’t even use flex and I understand what it is from this description. Flex is just a library for action script functions. They are releasing a Java action script compiler. I know compilers, and I know java isn’t a good choice for one.
But ok, they are releasing the action script compiler and debugger source and some class library for AS.
That’s only going to help those who use FLEX and want to poke into the libraries in the same way MFC source code was included with VC++ and the same way the .NET source libraries are included, and the java libraries with the sun JRE.
This is no big deal. This is not the actual runtime for flash. This will not get flash into FOSS stuff like Linux distros and let people develop FOSS tools to edit flash movies.
This is just like the Microsoft shared source for their “Open source” initiatives. Every bit as much of a token gesture the way I see it.
I think what this announcement is actually *implying* in it’s importance would be this: http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
and this: http://osflash.org/red5
I think Adobe wants people to believe that their announcement is on that scale, but is actually just a class library and the AS compiler, written in Java.
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Disappointed really, I know it sounds like a great thing but really the source was already available anyway much like Java going open source.
Really won’t make much difference to the developer as they already had the information they needed to get their job done.
The big difference will be which side of the fence makes it easier to develop in rather than open sourcing it.
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Disappointed really, I know it sounds like a great thing but really the source was already available anyway much like Java going open source.
Really won’t make much difference to the developer as they already had the information they needed to get their job done.
The big difference will be which side of the fence makes it easier to develop in rather than open sourcing it.
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Great news. Eyejot was built with Flex. So, the more people using it, the better for us. We need great developers. I guess I was wrong about what I thought you were going to announce tonight.
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Great news. Eyejot was built with Flex. So, the more people using it, the better for us. We need great developers. I guess I was wrong about what I thought you were going to announce tonight.
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Ok so finally Flash developers get to do what Win32 platform developers have had for decades. great.
Show me the runtime! hehe
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Ok so finally Flash developers get to do what Win32 platform developers have had for decades. great.
Show me the runtime! hehe
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It opens up to anybody to build new tools that create applications for the flash platform. Like SAP:s netweaver does.
I was unaware of Flex until january. But it is simply great to develop with. And it’s fun once you start to learn the Actionscript API:s for the runtime and can start being creative. I love it!!
This is great news and it makes it much easier to go ahead using Flex despite working in a microsoft shop most of the time!! And it has already started to spread here – two other projects are starting up using Flex right now.
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It opens up to anybody to build new tools that create applications for the flash platform. Like SAP:s netweaver does.
I was unaware of Flex until january. But it is simply great to develop with. And it’s fun once you start to learn the Actionscript API:s for the runtime and can start being creative. I love it!!
This is great news and it makes it much easier to go ahead using Flex despite working in a microsoft shop most of the time!! And it has already started to spread here – two other projects are starting up using Flex right now.
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Joe @22 sums it up nicely. Flex has it place and adoption but it is very niche. A very very large majority of people will continue to use web+ajax application. Specially given that the Web stack (HTML, CSS, Javascript, JSON, XML, etc..) and browsers are continuing to evolve.
If there was a lot of demand for a parallel stack, companies like Lazlo (which have also been open source) would have grown beyond some niche applications.
Adobe should instead try to understand how they can help integrate, enhance and promote the best of breed evolution around Ajax and provide a cleaner/more open/more transparent integration between Flash/PDF and the web stack. (But for that they have to live with the fact that web technologies is bigger than them and they can not control it).
-Edwin
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Joe @22 sums it up nicely. Flex has it place and adoption but it is very niche. A very very large majority of people will continue to use web+ajax application. Specially given that the Web stack (HTML, CSS, Javascript, JSON, XML, etc..) and browsers are continuing to evolve.
If there was a lot of demand for a parallel stack, companies like Lazlo (which have also been open source) would have grown beyond some niche applications.
Adobe should instead try to understand how they can help integrate, enhance and promote the best of breed evolution around Ajax and provide a cleaner/more open/more transparent integration between Flash/PDF and the web stack. (But for that they have to live with the fact that web technologies is bigger than them and they can not control it).
-Edwin
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@32. I think Adobe’s vision with Flex is to create a new breed of Web application. It’s not detracting from AJAX but opening up Web developers to choice. Their Apollo project will allow for integration of both technologies. It’s only a good thing! I’m not sure it only serves a ‘niche’, it’s only in its infancy, but time will tell. (Note: Don’t forget Adobe have an AJAX framework named SPRY)
For Flex to really succeed it needs DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS. Open sourcing the framework is in effort of achieving this. The benefits of which will be the greater number of evangelists in the area, a more competitive market in terms of IDE’s to develop in, an increase in integration with 3rd party applications (see SAP Netweaver) and ultimately, more great applications that show off the technology (think BuzzWord, ScrapBlog and the many Business focused apps we’ll probably only ever ‘hear’ about not see).
I’m incredibly excited about the route Adobe is taking here.
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@32. I think Adobe’s vision with Flex is to create a new breed of Web application. It’s not detracting from AJAX but opening up Web developers to choice. Their Apollo project will allow for integration of both technologies. It’s only a good thing! I’m not sure it only serves a ‘niche’, it’s only in its infancy, but time will tell. (Note: Don’t forget Adobe have an AJAX framework named SPRY)
For Flex to really succeed it needs DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS. Open sourcing the framework is in effort of achieving this. The benefits of which will be the greater number of evangelists in the area, a more competitive market in terms of IDE’s to develop in, an increase in integration with 3rd party applications (see SAP Netweaver) and ultimately, more great applications that show off the technology (think BuzzWord, ScrapBlog and the many Business focused apps we’ll probably only ever ‘hear’ about not see).
I’m incredibly excited about the route Adobe is taking here.
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Stupid Adobe move.
They would be rewarded an order of magnitude more if they showed convincing arguments about how well they work with XAML files (note for the uninformed people : this XAML stuff is at the heart of the latest Microsoft strategy to own the internet).
A XAML importer would not do harm. And exporting to XAML from Flex would not either.
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Stupid Adobe move.
They would be rewarded an order of magnitude more if they showed convincing arguments about how well they work with XAML files (note for the uninformed people : this XAML stuff is at the heart of the latest Microsoft strategy to own the internet).
A XAML importer would not do harm. And exporting to XAML from Flex would not either.
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Flex is beyond Ajax. And, more importantly, Flex can be used by corporate developers who are not browser-javascript experts. There is only one runtime that works everywhere.
But you *still* get the economy of a browser-based architecture.
The trouble is, at least here in europe, this target group of developers are largely unaware of Flex. On the other hand the MS hegemony anong these developers appear to be breaking up and they are very slowly starting to look outside the box.
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Flex is beyond Ajax. And, more importantly, Flex can be used by corporate developers who are not browser-javascript experts. There is only one runtime that works everywhere.
But you *still* get the economy of a browser-based architecture.
The trouble is, at least here in europe, this target group of developers are largely unaware of Flex. On the other hand the MS hegemony anong these developers appear to be breaking up and they are very slowly starting to look outside the box.
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But, yes, you’re right, next week is going to be fun at Mix too. Microsoft has a better system and tooling: if you’re on Windows.
And either don’t care about Linux whatsoever, or never plan on doing any dev work with anything but Windows, or plan on building your own dev tools.
Adobe is way ahead in market adoption all over the place. Will Yahoo Maps switch to Silverlight? Will Google’s Finance site switch to Silverlight? Will startups like Scrapblog (which is mondo cool) switch to Silverlight?
Heh…nah, they understand that Linux and unix count.
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But, yes, you’re right, next week is going to be fun at Mix too. Microsoft has a better system and tooling: if you’re on Windows.
And either don’t care about Linux whatsoever, or never plan on doing any dev work with anything but Windows, or plan on building your own dev tools.
Adobe is way ahead in market adoption all over the place. Will Yahoo Maps switch to Silverlight? Will Google’s Finance site switch to Silverlight? Will startups like Scrapblog (which is mondo cool) switch to Silverlight?
Heh…nah, they understand that Linux and unix count.
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Yawn.
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Yawn.
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Reflector. .NET is open source. What was .NET to cheap for Adobe 🙂
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Reflector. .NET is open source. What was .NET to cheap for Adobe 🙂
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150k compared to millions using .NET. Real news please.
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150k compared to millions using .NET. Real news please.
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“Reflector. .NET is open source.”
What an uninformed association of words.
.NET is a commercial run-time whose implementation is not known. There is a ton of “Microsoft-like” patents associated with it.
The ability to “reverse engineer” public assemblies is not what defines .NET. Java has been doing that for even longer (and I’m pretty sure there is prior art too).
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“Reflector. .NET is open source.”
What an uninformed association of words.
.NET is a commercial run-time whose implementation is not known. There is a ton of “Microsoft-like” patents associated with it.
The ability to “reverse engineer” public assemblies is not what defines .NET. Java has been doing that for even longer (and I’m pretty sure there is prior art too).
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Wow, talk about an OVERHYPED announcement. And the overhypnig wasn’t done by Adobe, but by you Scoble. This is where your lack of technical grounding mainfests itself, as you misunderstood this issue and blew it out of proportion.
Remember your post of a couple days ago where you and your followers trashed “Alfred” for suggesting that your not being a developer and/or lacking technical grounding lessened your value as an attendee at Mix? This shows what what he was talking about.
This is also another example of your colossal ego. Do you really think that Adobe would choose your show to announce something as HUGE (as huge as you made it out to be)? Come on, now.
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Wow, talk about an OVERHYPED announcement. And the overhypnig wasn’t done by Adobe, but by you Scoble. This is where your lack of technical grounding mainfests itself, as you misunderstood this issue and blew it out of proportion.
Remember your post of a couple days ago where you and your followers trashed “Alfred” for suggesting that your not being a developer and/or lacking technical grounding lessened your value as an attendee at Mix? This shows what what he was talking about.
This is also another example of your colossal ego. Do you really think that Adobe would choose your show to announce something as HUGE (as huge as you made it out to be)? Come on, now.
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This is great news! It should be interesting for the ‘London Flash Platform User Group’ meetup in London tomorrow. http://www.lfpug.com/
I can see the topic changing pretty quickly from JavaBeans and Apollo! 😉
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This is great news! It should be interesting for the ‘London Flash Platform User Group’ meetup in London tomorrow. http://www.lfpug.com/
I can see the topic changing pretty quickly from JavaBeans and Apollo! 😉
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For the people repeating the “the source was already available” mantra, you don’t seem to be grasping an important aspect here. Available != open. The community will eventually (end of 2007 apparently) be able to submit changes to the framework. You can’t do that with the .NET framework, so comparisons to its source being available are missing the point.
The compilers and debugger being made available open the door for alternatives to the Flex Builder IDE, something sure to be embraced by Linux and other free-software enthusiasts.
While I don’t know that this announcement is monumental, its interesting how pretty much every person “bashing” this announcement seems to be blissfully uninformed about what it really means.
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For the people repeating the “the source was already available” mantra, you don’t seem to be grasping an important aspect here. Available != open. The community will eventually (end of 2007 apparently) be able to submit changes to the framework. You can’t do that with the .NET framework, so comparisons to its source being available are missing the point.
The compilers and debugger being made available open the door for alternatives to the Flex Builder IDE, something sure to be embraced by Linux and other free-software enthusiasts.
While I don’t know that this announcement is monumental, its interesting how pretty much every person “bashing” this announcement seems to be blissfully uninformed about what it really means.
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Am disappointed Scoble. Won’t affect developers much, except the meta-developers, i.e the ones who develop IDEs.
An even bigger disappointment would be Microsoft not shipping a tiny CLR inside Silverlight…
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Am disappointed Scoble. Won’t affect developers much, except the meta-developers, i.e the ones who develop IDEs.
An even bigger disappointment would be Microsoft not shipping a tiny CLR inside Silverlight…
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>Wow, talk about an OVERHYPED announcement.
Interesting reaction. Did I say it’ll cure cancer above?
I’m not the one who got this to the top of TechMeme and more than 500 Diggs. I guess you think I control people like Ryan Stewart and all the folks over on Digg, right? Not to mention Ted Leung or Nik over at TechCrunch. Yeah, those people all listen to me. Bwwwwaaaahhhhaaahhhhaaaaaa.
http://www.techmeme.com/070426/p11#a070426p11
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>Wow, talk about an OVERHYPED announcement.
Interesting reaction. Did I say it’ll cure cancer above?
I’m not the one who got this to the top of TechMeme and more than 500 Diggs. I guess you think I control people like Ryan Stewart and all the folks over on Digg, right? Not to mention Ted Leung or Nik over at TechCrunch. Yeah, those people all listen to me. Bwwwwaaaahhhhaaahhhhaaaaaa.
http://www.techmeme.com/070426/p11#a070426p11
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This is a great first step, but certain important pieces will be held back, including the Flash player and the Eclipse-based Adobe Flex Builder. Governance of the project will remain firmly in the company’s hands. See “Adobe keeps Flash, Flex close to the vest” for more analysis.
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Although Flex is good, I really doubt if making the source open is going to kick-start a large scale adoption of this technology.
This sounds like a decision made by a manager who’s teenage son mentioned the term ‘Open Source’ during the dinner time conversation.
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Although Flex is good, I really doubt if making the source open is going to kick-start a large scale adoption of this technology.
This sounds like a decision made by a manager who’s teenage son mentioned the term ‘Open Source’ during the dinner time conversation.
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This is a great first step, but certain important pieces will be held back, including the Flash player and the Eclipse-based Adobe Flex Builder. Governance of the project will remain firmly in the company’s hands. See “Adobe keeps Flash, Flex close to the vest” for more analysis.
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Sorry: 615 Diggs. http://digg.com/tech_news/Adobe_Flex_Goes_Open_Source
I +wish+ I had 615 Digger’s under my control. Thanks for the laugh this morning!
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Sorry: 615 Diggs. http://digg.com/tech_news/Adobe_Flex_Goes_Open_Source
I +wish+ I had 615 Digger’s under my control. Thanks for the laugh this morning!
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http://digg.com/offbeat_news/The_only_person_that_has_ever_been_struck_by_a_particle_accelerator_s_beam
submitted, made popular 5 hours 43 min ago
http://digg.com/tech_news/Adobe_Flex_Goes_Open_Source
submitted, made popular 5 hours 23 min ago
This generic link to wikipedia about a guy that stuck his head in a particle accelerator was submitted at the same time and has twice as many diggs.
I agree with everybody who said this isn’t important.
Action script isn’t a real programming language, and I think the responses here highlight that.
I’m still shocked that somebody wrote a commercial compiler with java.
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http://digg.com/offbeat_news/The_only_person_that_has_ever_been_struck_by_a_particle_accelerator_s_beam
submitted, made popular 5 hours 43 min ago
http://digg.com/tech_news/Adobe_Flex_Goes_Open_Source
submitted, made popular 5 hours 23 min ago
This generic link to wikipedia about a guy that stuck his head in a particle accelerator was submitted at the same time and has twice as many diggs.
I agree with everybody who said this isn’t important.
Action script isn’t a real programming language, and I think the responses here highlight that.
I’m still shocked that somebody wrote a commercial compiler with java.
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They should make the flash plugin read that XML file instead of the binary .swf.
Besides, they should fast-track this specification through ISO before Microsoft does it.
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They should make the flash plugin read that XML file instead of the binary .swf.
Besides, they should fast-track this specification through ISO before Microsoft does it.
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@63
An Open XML ISO/ANSI described rich media browser format would be excellent. That would truly open the door to having open tools to generate browser content.
What’s going to happen now is that they open sourced the action script “compiler”, but the action script itself is still not a standardized language or intermediate code format.
If somebody else modifies the action script compiler and re-releases a flash movie generator/IDE, Adobe could easily sue them for violating the copyright on their format.
That’s why this announcement is completely and utterly meaningless.
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@63
An Open XML ISO/ANSI described rich media browser format would be excellent. That would truly open the door to having open tools to generate browser content.
What’s going to happen now is that they open sourced the action script “compiler”, but the action script itself is still not a standardized language or intermediate code format.
If somebody else modifies the action script compiler and re-releases a flash movie generator/IDE, Adobe could easily sue them for violating the copyright on their format.
That’s why this announcement is completely and utterly meaningless.
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I’m disappointed. From reading Scoble’s earlier post, I thought this would be bigger. But I’m sure those that care will like it.
@57.
Yuri, as you may know, the original wpf/e spec includes the mini-CLR (I still have the PowerPoint presentations ;)). (For some reason, they said that they would only support C# and VB, which didn’t make sense to me; seems that it would automatically support any language that spit out MSIL (the mini-CLR version of MSIL, anyway).)
They indicated that such functionality would follow the JScript/XAML stuff, but we haven’t heard much about it since then, so I fear it might have been dropped. 😦 (Maybe they figured that a mini-CLR would be akin to Java web-applets, which Flash blew out of the water.) I hope not, but I guess we’ll find out next week (I’m sure someone will ask about it at Mix if Microsoft doesn’t say anything about it themselves.)
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I’m disappointed. From reading Scoble’s earlier post, I thought this would be bigger. But I’m sure those that care will like it.
@57.
Yuri, as you may know, the original wpf/e spec includes the mini-CLR (I still have the PowerPoint presentations ;)). (For some reason, they said that they would only support C# and VB, which didn’t make sense to me; seems that it would automatically support any language that spit out MSIL (the mini-CLR version of MSIL, anyway).)
They indicated that such functionality would follow the JScript/XAML stuff, but we haven’t heard much about it since then, so I fear it might have been dropped. 😦 (Maybe they figured that a mini-CLR would be akin to Java web-applets, which Flash blew out of the water.) I hope not, but I guess we’ll find out next week (I’m sure someone will ask about it at Mix if Microsoft doesn’t say anything about it themselves.)
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I can’t keep track..is Adobe also a PodTech “sponsor”?
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I can’t keep track..is Adobe also a PodTech “sponsor”?
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LayZ: yes, but they didn’t pay for this. I cover a lot of companies that don’t pay anything. They are not a sponsor of ScobleShow.
Does the Wall Street Journal disclose when they write about an advertiser? No, unless they are paying for that coverage. Adobe did not do that here. I’m not compensated to cover one company more than another and would be happy to do this style coverage for Microsoft or Lazlo too, if they want to invite me into their offices and give me exclusive video news the way Adobe did here (or eBay on Monday — eBay is not a PodTech advertiser yet).
By the way, all of our clients are listed right on PodTech.net’s home page. Just visit http://www.podtech.net and see if they have a logo there.
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LayZ: yes, but they didn’t pay for this. I cover a lot of companies that don’t pay anything. They are not a sponsor of ScobleShow.
Does the Wall Street Journal disclose when they write about an advertiser? No, unless they are paying for that coverage. Adobe did not do that here. I’m not compensated to cover one company more than another and would be happy to do this style coverage for Microsoft or Lazlo too, if they want to invite me into their offices and give me exclusive video news the way Adobe did here (or eBay on Monday — eBay is not a PodTech advertiser yet).
By the way, all of our clients are listed right on PodTech.net’s home page. Just visit http://www.podtech.net and see if they have a logo there.
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@Mr. Robinson: Yep, first there was a mention of a mini-CLR, then they said it would be dropped for the first release, then they said we’re listening, and now everybody’s saying that we’re goanna get the miniCLR at Mix. I do really hope that happens…
And as for the only C# and VB.NET thing, it’s probably because most other compilers make use of heavy reflection and other complex funtionality that’ll get cut from a miniCLR in no time.
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@Mr. Robinson: Yep, first there was a mention of a mini-CLR, then they said it would be dropped for the first release, then they said we’re listening, and now everybody’s saying that we’re goanna get the miniCLR at Mix. I do really hope that happens…
And as for the only C# and VB.NET thing, it’s probably because most other compilers make use of heavy reflection and other complex funtionality that’ll get cut from a miniCLR in no time.
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While I have been more the DBA over pure Developer, easy enough to sniff out the Adobe spin-doctoring here.
Obscure low-market share product, “opened up”, attempting to appear bigger than it really is for competitor conference mindshare grabbing, when it’s pretty much a hollow announcement.
Lucky for them, bloggers with video cameras, filming whatever talks and moves. New media infomericalites stung by the spin.
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While I have been more the DBA over pure Developer, easy enough to sniff out the Adobe spin-doctoring here.
Obscure low-market share product, “opened up”, attempting to appear bigger than it really is for competitor conference mindshare grabbing, when it’s pretty much a hollow announcement.
Lucky for them, bloggers with video cameras, filming whatever talks and moves. New media infomericalites stung by the spin.
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@35 Paul,
I think that it is naive to think that because you dump your code to open source you are going to get a lot of developers, specially for larger companies. Laslo has been open source since its inception.
You mentioned a new breed of applications. I agree that there has been over the last 3-4 years the emergence of new/richer apps but I believe that they will be powered by an evolving HTML, DOM, CSS, Javascript, JSON and XML stack rather than Flex or XAML.
You mentioned SPRY. I think that SPRY is part of the problem. Instead of looking at the existing used/successful/emerging frameworks (and there are a lot of them) and build tooling, management and integration across them, Adobe decided to re-inventing the wheel. As a result they will NOT benefits from the organic evolution of all the other frameworks.
At the end of the day, adoption is the only thing that counts. Adobe (like Microsoft) has enough money to create a tornado when they launch something and everyone knows that in a tornado, even turkeys can fly.
-Edwin
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@35 Paul,
I think that it is naive to think that because you dump your code to open source you are going to get a lot of developers, specially for larger companies. Laslo has been open source since its inception.
You mentioned a new breed of applications. I agree that there has been over the last 3-4 years the emergence of new/richer apps but I believe that they will be powered by an evolving HTML, DOM, CSS, Javascript, JSON and XML stack rather than Flex or XAML.
You mentioned SPRY. I think that SPRY is part of the problem. Instead of looking at the existing used/successful/emerging frameworks (and there are a lot of them) and build tooling, management and integration across them, Adobe decided to re-inventing the wheel. As a result they will NOT benefits from the organic evolution of all the other frameworks.
At the end of the day, adoption is the only thing that counts. Adobe (like Microsoft) has enough money to create a tornado when they launch something and everyone knows that in a tornado, even turkeys can fly.
-Edwin
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“New media infomericalites”
It would be awesome if some of these very people were forced to take some computer science classes, before they could receive a license to blog.
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“New media infomericalites”
It would be awesome if some of these very people were forced to take some computer science classes, before they could receive a license to blog.
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“New media infomericalites…”
The best description to date of what PodTech does.
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“New media infomericalites…”
The best description to date of what PodTech does.
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@69 “They are not a sponsor of ScobleShow”
Fair enough. But unless you are a wholely own subsidiary of PodTech, I gotta think the money goes into one big pot and ScobleShow stays afloat one more day from the exposure Adobe gets
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@69 “They are not a sponsor of ScobleShow”
Fair enough. But unless you are a wholely own subsidiary of PodTech, I gotta think the money goes into one big pot and ScobleShow stays afloat one more day from the exposure Adobe gets
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@64, you’re quite wrong there. ActionScript is a fully compliant superset of the EcmaScript 4 standard. You know, the same standard JavaScript is based on?
As for Adobe suing people, one of the stated goals of this move is to allow the creation of 3rd party IDEs. Sounds like you’ve not done very much research on this topic. Perhaps you should.
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@64, you’re quite wrong there. ActionScript is a fully compliant superset of the EcmaScript 4 standard. You know, the same standard JavaScript is based on?
As for Adobe suing people, one of the stated goals of this move is to allow the creation of 3rd party IDEs. Sounds like you’ve not done very much research on this topic. Perhaps you should.
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I love the video! Keep it coming
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I love the video! Keep it coming
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When did the table turn? What I see here are MS fanboys reacting like yesterdays tiresome linux-zealots used to do.
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When did the table turn? What I see here are MS fanboys reacting like yesterdays tiresome linux-zealots used to do.
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Chris: actually I was a computer science major before I switched to Journalism and survived computer classes, and two years of calculus.
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Chris: actually I was a computer science major before I switched to Journalism and survived computer classes, and two years of calculus.
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>ScobleShow stays afloat one more day from the exposure Adobe gets:
Will you say the same thing next week when I post a Microsoft video?
I’ve posted more than 200 interviews now, only a handful of which come from companies that sponsor us.
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>ScobleShow stays afloat one more day from the exposure Adobe gets:
Will you say the same thing next week when I post a Microsoft video?
I’ve posted more than 200 interviews now, only a handful of which come from companies that sponsor us.
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@80
“When did the table turn? What I see here are MS fanboys reacting like yesterdays tiresome linux-zealots used to do.”
You misread. Many of those downplaying this Adobe think ARE linux fanboys that hate Microsoft (e.g. Chris of beercosoft.com).
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@80
“When did the table turn? What I see here are MS fanboys reacting like yesterdays tiresome linux-zealots used to do.”
You misread. Many of those downplaying this Adobe think ARE linux fanboys that hate Microsoft (e.g. Chris of beercosoft.com).
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OK wake me up when google can read flash as well as xhtml.
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OK wake me up when google can read flash as well as xhtml.
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Adobe just guaranteed their product will be more successful than MS’s by going open source.
People are starting to realize that open platforms are better for their businesses and their wallets.
I’m considering starting my own company in an area where I have considerable experience: network and computer security. I will use and recommend only open/free (license) software like Linux, the BSDs, OpenOffice, etc.
In an age where DRM creep and evil licensure is stifling rather than encouraging, people will do better with free/open platforms.
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Adobe just guaranteed their product will be more successful than MS’s by going open source.
People are starting to realize that open platforms are better for their businesses and their wallets.
I’m considering starting my own company in an area where I have considerable experience: network and computer security. I will use and recommend only open/free (license) software like Linux, the BSDs, OpenOffice, etc.
In an age where DRM creep and evil licensure is stifling rather than encouraging, people will do better with free/open platforms.
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“OK wake me up when google can read flash as well as xhtml.”
Hey, wake up! 😉
jd/adobe
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“OK wake me up when google can read flash as well as xhtml.”
Hey, wake up! 😉
jd/adobe
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John
Yes they know its there but I said as well as good xhtml.
I see far to many flashy websites desinged for small busineses that look pritty but don’t perform for google.
most websites are there for a business reason using flash can make it vary hard to get any ROI on your web presence.
I am at a trade show tomorow on our stand and Ill bet we will see one or two potential clinets with this problem.
Jakob Nielsen coment last year that most(ie joe public) people us the internet via Googles saerch box is very true.
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John
Yes they know its there but I said as well as good xhtml.
I see far to many flashy websites desinged for small busineses that look pritty but don’t perform for google.
most websites are there for a business reason using flash can make it vary hard to get any ROI on your web presence.
I am at a trade show tomorow on our stand and Ill bet we will see one or two potential clinets with this problem.
Jakob Nielsen coment last year that most(ie joe public) people us the internet via Googles saerch box is very true.
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“most websites are there for a business reason using flash can make it vary hard to get any ROI on your web presence.”
I’m not sure of a search query to quickly prove this, but if you check the websites of Fortune 500 companies, you’ll find that many of them use SWF. (Yes, small websites can use SWF inappropriately, but the fact that some can doesn’t mean that all do.)
jd/adobe
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“most websites are there for a business reason using flash can make it vary hard to get any ROI on your web presence.”
I’m not sure of a search query to quickly prove this, but if you check the websites of Fortune 500 companies, you’ll find that many of them use SWF. (Yes, small websites can use SWF inappropriately, but the fact that some can doesn’t mean that all do.)
jd/adobe
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