Re: FLASH: MM's Flash 4 wish list (now: SWF)

[John Dowdell]

[ Reminder: Wishlist items are best sent to

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where they will reach all product planners for Flash, and will also be

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At 5:05 PM 10/23/98, Joe Crawford wrote:

>And - if possible from our friends at macromedia - can you comment

>on how you would feel if someone came out with alternate players -

>would the re be a licensing issue if they did either a) or b) above?


If you don't mind me cheerfully reserving the right to be overruled by

those who read legalese better than I do, then the open SWF file format can

be used by anyone. It's a published and publicly available document. As

Nigel points out, some are already implementing SWF players of various

capabilities.


Macromedia does license the Flash player engine... this executable code can

be purchased for use in porting, and use of this core code would have the

highest likelihood of feature similarity if you're creating players for an

unusual platform. Still, people are reading and displaying parts of SWFs

today, with players they've developed themselves.



>And here's a point to wonder about - could a graphics community,

>say, adobe, make an export filter within, say, Illustrator, for

>Flash - would there be a licensing fee there?


I don't think that licensing would necessarily be needed here, because

Adobe engineers can read the SWF spec and write to it. If they needed

assistance or tips then they might want to hire that service. But it's

certainly possible for third-party tools to write SWF today. If you're

still using Illustrator then you may wish to request that Adobe add this as

a future feature.


(Hmm, as a parallel, FreeHand has been reading and writing multipage Adobe

Acrobat files for quite some time... just like SWF, PDF is a published

format.)


Another toolmaker wouldn't need to bother with .FLA files at all... they

could just export SWF. For instance, Autodesk could piggyback on the large

installed base of Flash players to display wireframe plans made in AutoCAD.

It's just another export format.



Rusty Worden wrote:

> Hmmm. If it is so darn easy (in other words 3rd party people have

> made swf players) then why MM's reluctance?


Not reluctance so much as prioritization. There are currently over a

half-dozen Flash 3 players (plugins, platforms, projectors), and we still

need to get the Flash Asset Xtra up to 3.0 status for Director and

Authorware, and there's Java and WebTV and Real and other concerns too. In

addition to that, content creators here on FLASHER-L want Flash itself to

improve as well, and so various *nix versions will not take precedence over

Flash 4 and beyond.


It's great that some are finding the open SWF format useful enough to write

their own players. This is a way for even small audiences to be able to

view these types of content... it's decentralized.


Links:

http://www.linuks.ukpost.com/advocacy/shockwave.html

http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Labyrinth/5084/flash.html


jd





John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US


Private email options: http://www.macromedia.com/support/priority.html

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Luscious web graphics: http://www.macromedia.com/software/fireworks/




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