Tag Archives: flash

Adobe Buys Macromedia

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I didn’t expect to see that in the news this morning (hat tip glazou), but I did expect it to happen years ago. The two companies just seem complementary. As proof of that I’ve often heard people confuse the companies and their products. This is big news for the industry as a whole. I can see many things changing:

  • Daniel Glazman mentions that there’s likely only room for 1 html editor. Go Live or DreamWeaver. I’m personally going to suggests DreamWeaver survives. Simply because it’s more robust. It’s advanced features such as editing code, php, etc. are much better than Go Live. It reaches a larger market. As for the impact on NVU? Well I guess that remains to be seen. I guess people will now be looking to see if DreamWeaver will be the only real commercial game in town.
  • SVG. This I think is the largest impact this deal is going to have. The fate of SVG. Adobe has been pushing SVG since very early on. But now with Flash in their hands. How do they feel about an open standard? Will they perhaps decide to open Flash to relax critics and just push their software as the ‘ultimate Flash IDE’? Will they stifle the growth of SVG? Or will they perhaps make the Flash plugin render SVG just like QuickTime or other media plugins support multiple formats?
  • Adobe has made a business of being cross platform (similar to Netscape). Their Acrobat Reader is available for virtually anything (even the Palm OS). Does this mean better Flash support for non-windows computers (which has historically sucked)?
  • PDF + Flash + Shockwave = ?
  • New products? Will Illustrator and Flash converge?
  • How does Photoshop fit in? Will it integrate with Macromedia Products?

Overall this is a groundbreaking event. It’s not unexpected as their products were complementary for ages and it was inevitable for them to come together. It’s finally happened.

Flash Killer

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I’m blogging to much this week, but I can’t stop.

Daniel Glazman, has showcased how some CSS and JavaScript can be a great alternative to Flash.

I left a little comment:

Perhaps an awesome extension to Composer would be something that would create a GUI to create such effects. Technically, most designers use flash all in similar ways. Why not analyze those a bit, and create a product that does the popular stuff in a non-proprietary way?

Would be neat.

And the reply:

Robert Accettura : absolutely. That’s in my plans.

This is a great thing. Most Flash developers only do one of several things with Flash. It’s the same animations, mouseovers every time. What a great free way to do so, using standard free products in the browser already, and not even leave your web development app.

SVG would be nice too, but until native support is robust and standard in Mozilla, I don’t think that will happen.

Either way, that’s a major development headline.

Don’t get me wrong, Flash is nice. It’s pretty cool actually. But it’s overused, and proprietary. Most of the time it’s completely unnecessary. Flash isn’t needed for a mouseover. That’s a waste. I think with the many new features he’s put into code over the past few months, plus this, he’s got a dynamite app on his hands. One I’m itching to get my hands on. Hopefully he’ll be commiting some code into Mozilla’s CVS sooner than later :-D .