Re: FLASH: PUBLISH woes...

[Mark Strassman]

Hi Robert et al,


My name is Mark Strassman, and I am the Sr. Product Line Manager for

Flash. Firstly, in implementing the publish feature, the development team

had nothing but developer's concerns in mind. We certainly do not want to

force Web site consumers to download any software they do not want or

need. Our primary goal at Macromedia is to help and empower Web

developers in their creative and professional efforts. If there is a bug

or poorly implemented feature that undermines which that goal, we want to

fix it promptly.


In reading the flasher thread, however, I am still trying to understand

the actual problem, so that I can help resolve it. 


The intended operation of the Publish command is as follows:


Without adjusting any of the publish settings, the defaults are to

publish a Flash 4 SWF file, and wrap the file with HTML specifying the

Flash 4 player. We implemented this as such so that if a user uses Flash

4 specific features (text entry fields, advanced ActionScript, etc), the

proper player will download, so that the Web browser will see the

content.


We know that many users will want to implement only Flash 3 features, and

provided settings for those in the Publish Settings dialog. If a user

publishes a Flash 3 file, and chooses the Flash 3 HTML template in the

HTML tab of Publish settings, the generated HTML specifies the Flash 3

player, and should not download player version 4.


If a publisher want to publish Flash 3 content, solely for the Flash 3

player, the user must specify Flash 3 in two locations of Publish

settings:


1. The Flash tab (specifies what version of Flash is exported. Flash 4 is

default, user may specify Flash 3)

2. The HTML tab (specifies what HTML wraps the Flash movie. Flash 4 is

default, user may specify Flash 3. The default selection under the HTML

tab does specify version 4 player, which will be auto-downloaded for

Active X. The user must manually specify the Flash 3 HTML option, if they

so desire.)


If these features are not operating properly, or if you expect them to

operate differently, please let me know, and I will make every effort to

correct the problem.


Thanks your for your patience with this matter, and I look forward to

your feedback.


Sincerely,


Mark Strassman

Flash Sr. Product Manager

>From: "Robert Koberg" <robkoberg [dot] com>
>To: <flashershocker [dot] com>
>Subject: Re: FLASH: PUBLISH woes...
>Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 22:38:02 -0700
>X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2314.1300
>Sender: ownershocker [dot] com
>Reply-To: flashershocker [dot] com
>
>No Brad.This is a bug.  If it is not a bug then it was definitely an
>underhanded way of getting more F4 downloads. This at the expense of the
>developer's time. For example, I download and install Flash 4.  In fact, I
>download it on all of the test computers because a job required F4. Now I
>have a job that requires flash 3. I do the job. It tests fine on all my
>machines.  I then hand it over to the client (who has already dloaded f4
>because she is so excited about gettting to use flash in her project).  It
>works fine on her machine.  She enables it for a beta team.  The team (like
>the general popualtion of users for this example) are all equiped with the
>same spec: yadayada browser and Flash3.  Boom - it does not work the way I
>told them it would.  What? they need to download something???  Why did we go
>to the trouble of having the spec??? (by the way, I am making this up)
>
>Now of  course the response will be, "he shoudl have tested on the delivery
>platform, that being Flash 3 on target machines."  Yea, sure. But do you
>think that is the way the general flash population will behave. I bet there
>are going to be many questions asked about "why is it asking me to download
>when I choose to save as Flash3???"  (and we won't have an archive to point
>people to so we will answer the same question over and over and over...)
>
>to MACR:
>Why is there a Save As Flash 3?  so there is some backward compatibility.
>Why is there the afterburner thingy in the menu? so we do not have to go
>into the HTML.  Why did you make it so when we save as Flash 3 we have to go
>in and edit html code? because you wanted more flash 4 downloads. Did you
>tell the user about this? Did you leave up to him/her to figure it out for
>themselves? Did you miss the bug?
>
>
>>
>> I can see you're upset about this situation, and I'm sorry that's the
>case.  I can assure you we were not doing any "snickering in a back room"
>over how we handling publishing Flash 3 content in Flash 4.  We worked hard
>at trying to make it as easy as possible for those people who want to
>continue serving up Flash 3 content.  At the same time, the improvements we
>made to Flash 4 made it impossible to continue just using the Flash 3
>ActiveX control.
>>
>> Given the situation described above, I believe the steps already described
>in my previous emails are easy, simple and usable.  If you use the default
>publish settings, we publish using references to the Flash 4 ActiveX
>control.  If you want to reference the Flash 3 ActiveX control, you use a
>different template.
>>
>> Brad
>> Flash QA