Re: FLASH: Any progress on these?

[John Dowdell]

At 8:33 AM 9/29/98, Wayne Townsend wrote, in parts:

>Extens to Load Movie...

>1. Load Quicktime  @ x,y

>2. Load RealPlayer @ x,y.  Obvious.

>

>PS: Wish.  A version of Flash that falls within the current version and

>Director.  One with a scripting language. My vote is Flash/SuperCard.


These would be difficult, politically... many people here on FLASHER-L

delight in the small player size for pure Flash content. The QT3 Asset Xtra

in Director 6.5/Win32 is over 400K in size, and the Lingo scripting engine

is half the size of the entire Shockwave plugin.


Instead of using Flash as the host for various media and interactivity

functions, suppose Flash was a guest in an interactive, multi-media host?

Standalone Director hosts make for the richest delivery option, but even a

normal browser host will let you deliver video and use scripting, to the

limits of each individual client instance. FSCommand is tricky but lets

these various objects intercommunicate, even in variegated browsers.


Rephrased, one of the great strengths of Flash is that it's fast to deliver

to new users, and can be used as a media element in a wide variety of

hosts. This requires a tight focus, and makes it difficult to act as a

bulky host itself, at least not without giving up some of these compelling

benefits.


(SuperTalk is certainly a valid English-like scripting language. A strict

port may be difficult, though, because it is card-based rather than

time-based, and Flash is intrinsically time-based. Lingo is likely a closer

match to the demands of such a task, and offers the performance benefits of

a compiled language.)



>Where is the Mac version of Severside Generator?

>Does anyone have any news on these?

>        Is there a demand for them?


Few enterprise servers are Mac-based, although Macs are certainly *heavily*

represented in the design community. That's why the design tools are on

Macintosh, and the server tools are on IIS/NT, Apache/Solaris, and

NES3.5/Solaris. (The two Solaris/Sparc servers went into public beta this

week... you can get the news from the Macromedia front page.)



I appreciate the wishlist items, Wayne... would it be possible for you to

forward them into the

wish-flashmacromedia [dot] com

 account? Although most of

the product team lurks here on FLASHER-L, not all members read each

message, and so explicit wishlist items will make sure the request doesn't

get lost in the crunch.


These particular requests might be difficult, technically and practically,

but it's _really_ appreciated if you can keep us up on what your wishes and

desires are... if there's a way to satisfy the overall goal, even through

different means, then that starts with knowing what the goal is! Thanks

again.


jd





John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US


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