DISQUS

Oh. When reading the post, I didn't know you were affiliated with PushButtonEngine. (For the future, it's good to clealry disclose... provides context to readers.)

tx, jd/adobe

Thanks, Ben. So, would I be on-track here, with this list of requests?
o no further rights-management offered by Adobe;
o less hardware acceleration, to keep devices more equivalent to each other;
o no gaming frameworks from Adobe;
o no per-pixel collision detection (which is in Player already, see Mike Chambers this week);
o consistent cross-device performance (without options for hardware acceleration);
o some additional type of tooling.

Did I summarize accurately? If so, I think I'd get pushback like "Don't use acceleration or frameworks or services if these are not desired." How can I better get across the idea?

tx, jd/adobe

Sorry, I'm not sure I can yet summarize this accurately to others.

First you said "Please make Flash into the ultimate console for the web and mobile devices," but instead of learning what you think that might be, there were a number of things you didn't want. There was a request for "consistent performance", but I'm not sure in what environments, with what metrics you saw the key difference. There was a request for "excellent tools", but all I know of what you're seeking is "Flex Builder is not that great". I'm not yet sure how to persuade others to help work to what you want.

Maybe I'm tired, sorry, but can you summarize, into something others can unequivocally understand in a sentence or two? Thanks.

jd/adobe

Hi Sarah, uh, I've got a dumb question... what is it? ;-)

My best guess is that it's a JavaScript library to more easily communicate and control webcams via Flash... set up your logic in JavaScript, and invoking the bridge routines handles all the Flash-specific stuff. True, or did I guess wrong...?

tx, jd/adobe

Thanks for recognizing the dynamic balance between the needs of creators and the needs of consumers:

"The ultimate conclusion however is that JetPack continues to tilt power away from the website creators to viewers. Webpage owners will have still less control over how their websites get viewed, used and understood...."

Sometimes a content creator wants a predictable presentation layer. Sometimes a consumer wants to change that presentation layer. Both needs are valid. The more options we have, the greater the chances that creators and consumers can find a mutually-acceptable contract.

(The alternative -- "everything must be greasmonkeyable, nothing else must be permitted!" -- creates an imbalance, and would deter many creative efforts. Choices help.)

jd/adobe

"Canvas is designed to work with HTML and JavaScript, without requiring a browser add-on as Flash does. "

But it would require either browser-profiling or asking the visitor to switch browsers... far less friendly than just using a cross-browser capability already in their browser.

"With the video tag in HTML 5, things become much easier. Instead of complex, error-prone embed codes, developers can point to the video in their code much as they now do to images. The video is much more likely to show up and play."

This is the main part I'd ask you to reconsider and investigate further, Anthony. Try visiting some sites which do use this "only in FF3.5" feature, and look at the markup they use to satisfy their visitors. It's _much_ more fragile.

There's a subtler issue with codecs. Right now Mozilla pre-releases play back video encoded as Ogg Theora. Apple seems to be pushing for a VIDEO tag so they can provide H.264 video to mobile. What will happen to that simple VIDEO tag when a Mozilla browser meets Apple content?

jd/adobe

I like diversity in transport channels. During 9/11 the web locked up, but broadcast was still efficient.

"Single point of failure" becomes your network connection. That's a little scary to me.

jd/adobe

Hi, Skyfire isn't so much "a browser" as a web service which translates webpages into another format that their clientside software can read, true?

tx, jd/adobe

Hi Dean, I also appreciate the work Vector Entertainment is doing, but to say that graphics in other games "almost always suck" sounds bizarre. Could I persuade you to write a clarification that gets across your idea more clearly...?

tx, jd/adobe

Hi Louis, if you needed it tonight, you could use it... software's functional before purchase.

That "order needs review" is unusual... I've seen it before when ordering across borders... could be other reasons too.

Sorry for any hassle, but I trust it'll work through without significant incident.

jd/adobe

I heard that, buried within the unread catacombs of The Stimulus Bill, is a clause that no pedestrians will be cited for shooting paintball guns at cars which don't use their turn signals or are otherwise hopeless bobos.... ;-)

"if you use Flash in a standard way you are often sending websites information about the other Flash sites you’ve been to"

Hi, how do you see that as being true? The only way I can see it is if you're talking about third-party content requested across website domains, but there's still a per-domain basis on such third-party content.

Can you clarify? Thanks!

jd/adobe

"Do Mozilla, Myspace or Facebook or similar independent organizations have any numbers that would give credibility to Dowdell's claims?"

huh? me? wha'd I say...? ;-)

jd/adobe

"Adobe didn’t include any past adoption numbers for an apples-to-apples comparison"

Hi Anthony, there's some at the census link, and more at the Internet Archive:
http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/fla...
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.macrome...

Ted Patrick is in Japan, and has a photo of a slide with relative adoption rates:
http://onflash.org/ted/2009/01/flash-player-10-...

tx, jd/adobe

... uhm, sorry, you'll have to ask Steve Jobs about that last one.... ;-)

jd/adobe

Howdy, thanks for keeping the faith in the meantime.... ;-)

There's a bunch of questions in there. I'm not able to speak for Steve Jobs on Apple's reasoning.

For "Why was North America slow?", I don't know, but I do know it's real... when I first visited Australia in the mid-90s I was shocked at how prevalent voice-mobiles were, and later in Japan I was shocked at how many people looked at their mobiles. San Francisco is finally starting to catch up. I don't know why, but I do know that Japan, Korea, Asia-Pacific, and Europe were all faster to go to handheld networks, and all faster to move beyond feature-phones to smartphones. This was a prerequisite for mobile Flash use, obviously.

For "current roadmap", Adobe wants to provide predictable interactivity upon any screen... doing for electronic displays what PostScript did for printers, what PDF did for documents. The response to the Open Screen Project has been very strong. Adobe doesn't ship devices itself, so device announcements always come from the people shipping them. This makes specific roadmaps difficult, but the general roadmap is looking pretty good. We're going to do what it takes to establish predictable screen-rendering, across any capable device.

jd/adobe

Sounds like you may be interested in Photoshop Elements, or Photoshop Express then. The Configurator in the new pro Photoshop may be of interest too.

(I liked the Hungry Hippo illustration, by the way, even though I had trouble understanding action games in contrast to strategy games.)

jd/adobe

Rule of thumb: If you don't see a Microsoft press release for a high-profile project, then odds are it's not a Silverlight deal.... ;-)
http://www.contentinople.com/author.asp?section...

jd/adobe

While reading your post, I realized that one of the big reasons I started blogging was to be able to efficiently respond to a hot issue popping up on a dozen mailing lists or newsgroups.

But now the same dynamic is working against blogging. That "Flash Lite ported to iPhone!" story this week is a good example. There are too many bloggers out there who don't read the issues they're earning ad-revenue from, and who screen out comments which don't match their desired narrative. I'm chasing new iterations of old issues across weblogs, just like I used to chase across mailing lists. PITA.

Twitter is useful for microblogging... a good 140 characters is more readable than some multi-screenful of text in a blog essay. Lots of tweets I see in summize.com are still incomprehensible, though, particularly when set up in a conversational chain. Blog essays are still useful, but they're not the daily habit they were a few years ago.

Maybe keep your weblog, but just change its focus? You've already got your Twitter stream in there, which helps for immediacy. One medium doesn't replace the other, true...?

"I would consider resolution when FreshAIRApps.com can keep their domain without threats from Adobe’s legal team."

Well, that's actually between the other two parties, not you and me, but I do understand Legal's general goal of keeping brandnames out of external products (a web domain location being the product here).

What I'll be working for inside Adobe is a better communication process... the info is public, but when a reminder is necessary, I think we need to handle it more persuasively.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aadobe.com...

jd/adobe

If you'll read the original conversations on the domain-branding issue you'll see it's already under resolution through other channels. (Your "Adobe has yet to publically acknowlege or respond" could use a correction or two.)

And yes, Adobe Reader is a big app. It's far more than just a document-viewing tool. If you think Ben's post turned it into "EPIC FAIL", then I guess I'm glad you didn't pick up on Mark Pilgrim or John Welch yet.... ;-)

jd/adobe

If they can offer something useful, that benefits all of us.

But this exchange sort of colored my view:
http://developers.curl.com/blogs/community_blog...

jd/adobe

.

re: "Smart People, Stupid Tweets. Fake News Spreads Fast on Twitter"

That headline reads strangely to me. Smart people don't believe things just on someone else's say-so.

.

A pseudonymous commenter said: "I understand that Adobe and Microsoft would like the web locked in to licenses for Flash and/or Silverlight so they can charge for the services and increase their revenue. In general, I distrust these companies in their quest for proprietary control of the web, and their greed."

Maybe we should meet for coffee some day. I'd like to better understand such surprising certainty of belief. ;-)

(An analyst asked Shantanu for news with Apple's iPhone, and he just confirmed the prior quarter's report that technical research was proceeding. I might expect blogospheric tremors if there was something actually shipping, but so many column-inches on so little news almost makes the paparazzi seem genteel.)

jd/adobe

Yes, I didn't go back to 2002 for links, just showed that the links exist. I figured anyone would be able to confirm the info, once they know it exists.

Google has provided mixed and untimely public info on what they do, but if you're part of the two-way conversation, you'll have read about the SEO mythologies for years.

jd/adobe