Radley Marx

Vectorpark’s Spider Demo

Fun and amazing Flash animation. Hard to say if it’s Papervision or not. Try it out & don’t forget to hit your mouse button when the cootie is nearby…

Flash Player – version number pattern has changed

Emmy Huang writes:

This new numbering system allows us to move towards more meaningful release numbering where the first, second and third digits actually mean Major, Minor, Bugfix. For example, the next bugfix or security release should jump up and use the series 10.0.20/10.0.21/10.0.22, and we can use “10.1″ (e.g. 10.1.30/10.1.31/10.1.32) when we do a feature-bearing dot release instead of “Flash Player 10 Update 1.” Old detection kits will continue to work, but moving forward you could detect for minor releases for a specific feature more easily. And it’s not a tongue twister.

It’s such a small change, but a very welcome one – particularly since it addresses one of my key gripes in my recent post on Adobe.

One quick pointer, the old detection kits supplied by Adobe are still half-baked. They were created back in the day of Flash 4 and are still pushed by Adobe even now.

Basically, the code slices up the player number (9.0.0.0) to figure out each value, but only reads the first two characters of the revision number. So 9.0.0.115 was mistaken as 9.0.0.11 (which played havoc for anyone trying to allow for H.264 or fullscreen video in player 9). This problem shouldn’t persist because of the numbering change, but I am seeing reports of  some sites that are having problems detecting player version 10, i.e. they may be seeing “1″ instead of “10″.

Anyways, this is a welcomed update. Should make things easer to explain to clients and non-dev (i.e. normal) people. ^_^

Adobe’s “Giant” Quality Problem

Over the weekend, Lee Brimelow created a brave post hoping to address some common critical questions he’s asked concerning some of Adobe’s inconsistencies. From this post I wandered over to Dear Adobe to catch up on user criticisms and was happy to see Adobe respond to two of the (twenty-five listed) applications: InDesign and After Effects.

Mordy Golding, a former product manager (’01-’04) for Illustrator was kind enough to step in and offer some of his insight as well. Unfortunately, most of his responses really set me off and encouraged me to offer my view on Adobe’s four primary quality issues.

1) Adobe the Giant

Adobe is huge. A monopoly looming over our creative community, which is counter-productive. Just look at Microsoft Office to gain an understanding of the direction Adobe is already going in. It’s not a nimble start-up focussed on their customers. It’s a corporation, now responsible to their shareholders. How big is Adobe? They can build a direct competitor to Joost or Hulu, and nobody blinks an eye.

Adobe products are also HUGE. Bloating is causing problems two-fold: it takes apps longer to load and run, and upgrades are more focussed on interoperability between apps than on streamlining. I can’t count how many software products Adobe offers, but most are sold in bundles. So for one application to see improvements, at least 30+ other application have to be ready to ship as well.

2) Adobe Ate Macromedia

When Adobe acquired Macromedia we lost the most important need: competition. Macromedia was small and kicking arse with amazing apps like Dreamweaver and Flash, while Adobe kludged along on GoLive and LiveMotion. Macromedia also had an amazing website that was easy to use, while Adobe’s website was so garishly bad, it was an embarrassment.

With the big gulp, Adobe quickly adopted Macromedia’s applications and website. But, sadly to say, it pretty much stopped there. Aside from Flash’s big AS3 bump, CS3 offered fixes to “the low-hanging fruit” including minimal integration between core applications (Illustrator/Fireworks artwork -> Flash).

Launched just over a year since CS3, CS4 does more of the same. Most of the obvious changes are in the UI, but each application gets only a slight bump. I do appreciate the improvements, but overall I’m having a very hard time seeing these improvements qualifying as two unique, high-price upgrades to their product line. Instead, what I see more is Adobe boldly pushing it’s customer base to pay for the Macromedia meal.

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