adobe and macromedia conference call
Burak KALAYCI pointed to Macromedia’s Securities and Exchange Commision filings. The database doesn’t have one of the more useful of user interfaces (a bit of RSS wouldn’t hurt either…) so I found myself clicking random links and eventually ended up at a transcript of Monday’s Adobe - Macromedia conference call.
Here are a couple of tidbits I gleaned from that document:
It would appear that 8ball (the next version of Flash) should be out by the end of September. (Gene Munster works for securities firm Piper Jaffray, Stephen Elop is President and CEO at Macromedia):
Gene Munster:
And then just one final question, is MX still on track for kind of August/September?
Stephen Elop:
Yeah.
Microsoft will be (is?) competition. The point was made earlier this week that in the past Adobe has been vocal about competing with Microsoft so this should not be a surprise. (Jay Vleeschhouwer is from Merrill Lynch, Bruce Chizen, is Adobe’s CEO):
Jay Vleeschhouwer:
Okay and competitively if you look out a couple of years towards what Microsoft is trying to do on the OS side, is there anything that you know for a certainty that at a minimum they’ll do that would compete with anything on the PDF or Flash side?
Bruce Chizen:
So, you know, historically both Macromedia and Adobe have been focused on the mission that we’ve articulated as helping people and organizations communicate better. And really what that meant is information that needs to be more compelling, more interactive, richer, impactful, reliable, more secure and that has not been a strong suit for Microsoft.
Clearly it’s an area that looks like based on what they tried to do with InfoPass, what they say that they’re trying to do with Longhorn, their code name for their future Windows Operating System, is similar to what we together are - have been doing and will continue to do. Clearly we are focused not only on the Windows platform but we do cover both Windows, Macintosh, Linux and many, many, many non-PC devices. So it’s hard to really say, you know, what Microsoft will do going forward but they are a $40 billion software company and we will always keep an eye out for them.
Obviously mobile was a big motivator for this deal. I don’t consider myself knowledgeable enough to draw any conclusions in this regard but some of the trancription errors made me chuckle. Flash Flare, Flash Fare both catchy (and ironic) names but I think he was talking about the Flash Player. And speaking of ironic, “very compelling risk platform”. Man, that is just too rich (groan). (Shantanu Narayen, is President and COO of Adobe):
Shantanu Narayen:
So I think with respect to the mobile space the reality is even Macromedia has been pretty heavily involved in defining SVG and working in the W3C Working Group that defined SVG Jay so I should mention that.
The reality is if you look at the Flash Flare—the four (unintelligible) around the Flash Fare, the small download, the high performance, the interactivity and the ubiquity really do make it a very, very compelling risk platform. And I think as we said earlier one of the things that’s exciting for us is we can bring the benefits of everything that they have done with animation and interactivity and video and see what we’ve done with documents and build an even better rich integrated platform for these mobile devices. So we think we can accelerate actually the adoption with a common flare on these devices.
Here’s a link to the transcript.
Here’s a link (.asf) to the conference call webcast which I found on the Macromedia investor relations page.
xmlparser xtra wrapper class
I recently wrote a JavaScript class to wrap the XmlParser Xtra for Authorware. Turns out I won’t be requiring it (atleast for now) and thought rather than abandon it I’d share it here. It’s pretty basic but I find it makes using the XmlParse.x32 in JavaScript a little more straightforward - allowing you to simply create an instance of the XmlParser. All the methods of the Xtra are then available as members of the instance. There is also one added method named destroy() which should be called before deleting an instance - it deletes the scripting Xtra object.
Here’s an example of creating a new instance:
var xml_file = "http://www.andrewlucking.com/feed/";
// create instance of XmlParser object
var my_xml = new XmlParser();
my_xml.ignoreWhitespace(true);
my_xml.parseFile(xml_file); // call parseFile method
I don’t consider it fully tested but am fairly confident it is solid so if you find any problems let me know. I find that the unique way the Xtra references the XML nodes takes a little while to get used to. Also I’ve noticed that calling parseMore() on a file that doesn’t exist (or that isn’t specified) will cause a fatal exception error. There’s a pretty foolproof parseMore() loop in the sample usage section of the class file. I think that’s about all.
Download link for the XmlParser.js.
adobe to acquire macromedia
Like most, I was quite surprised to read the announcement this morning of Adobe’s planned acquisition of Macromedia.
Really I don’t yet see what this brings to Macromedia besides a whole whack of cash. Perhaps Mike Chambers will disagree with me on this but that’s how I distill his blog entry as well. Of course he has some good facts in there so go read it if you’re interested. He’s right - the combined resources will be pretty significant and will make driving Flash as an application platform that much more substantial. I see the marketing power this brings, especially in the enterprise marketplace that Macromedia has been chasing pretty hard recently. This is the clout that Macromedia needs to turn the Flash Player into the application engine they envision - something they need to establish before Microsoft and Avalon come along. What I fear is that the innovation and openeness (relatively speaking) I associate with Macromedia with suffer. So for now I see this as an alignment of forces in preparation for the battle of desktop application environments of ‘07.
As far as Authorware is concerned this cannot be seen as bad news. Yes, it means things are likely to change but if we really think about it that has to be a good thing. Authorware has been getting only the minimal of support from Macromedia for a long time now and suffering from it. I can see the Authorware team at Macromedia working hard on the product (and for the developer community) but I can also see them not getting the resources they require. For Authorware any change is good change.
I don’t know where all this will wind up but the ride just got a hell of a lot more exciting and I wish the best of luck to all our comrades at Macromedia during this transition.
yet another macromedia conspiracy theory
Macromedia “conspiracy theories” seem to be all the rage these days so I thought I’d start one of my own.
A couple of weeks ago Macromedia updated their xml news aggregator to version 2.0 (mxna 2.0) and it is a very nice improvment over the original. Among other things the design has been improved, they’ve added multiple language support and included some handy sidebars. The search functionality has also been overhauled and they’ve provided an advanced search page.
One of the new sidebars is the Last 20 Searches which claims to be a list containing “the last 20 terms people have searched MXNA 2.0 for”. All part of the intitative to help readers spot trends and follow what other users are interested in. Others have mentioned the lighter side of the Last 20 Searches sidebar - how folks occasionally amuse themselves (and others) with the search list. But I’ve noticed something much more sinister at work here. It seems that the term Authorware isn’t deemed worthy to be included in that search list. Check it out:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mxna/index.cfm?searchterms=authorware&query=bySimpleSearch
In keeping with the “make dire allusions and refrain from conclusions” fad I’m going to let imagination connect the dots. (That’s not entirely true - I’ve just reported it as a bug but that was much too responsible of me).
About time someone broke out the Microsoft acquisition again ain’t it?
;-)
longhorn timeline
microsoft-watch.com has an article wondering if Microsoft will be able to meet the (most recent) Windows Longhorn timeline. It looks like a fall 2006 release should things go according to plan:
- April 2005: Preview/pre-beta release to OEMs and software vendors at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference.
- Summer 2005 (Microsoft is saying early; we’re hearing July/August): Longhorn Beta 1 released to testers.
- Late 2005 to mid-2006: Interim Longhorn builds (similar to the Community Technology Preview releases that Microsoft’s developer division has been delivering) go to testers
- Some time in the first half of 2006: Beta 2 released
- Q3/Q4 2006: Longhorn released to manufacturing and delivered to PC makers so they can preload it on new machines
- Holiday season 2006: Longhorn hits retail
Scoff away if that’s what you do. No doubt it’ll be bumpy but Avalon sounds pretty cool.
lso deletion extension for firefox
Who didn’t see this Firefox extension coming? Objection adds the ability to delete Flash local shared objects to the Firefox privacy panel.
As mentioned earlier this (and other shared object managment management functionality) is also available from the Flash Player settings manager.
Via Pete Freitag.
blogging a houseboat
Two buddies building a houseboat (the GT23 from boatplans-online.com) and blogging about it:
http://houseboatbuilder.blogspot.com/
a couple of interesting swf tools
There were a couple of interesting beta projects announced to the Flash world this week.
NeoSwiff from GlobFX provides the ability to compile to swf from C# code. It’s .NET compatible and even includes a (Windows only) IDE. No word on pricing yet. Check out a couple of samples here:
http://www.globfx.com/products/neoswiff/samples.php
Darron Schall mentioned this.
swfmill is an xml to swf (and swf to xml) conversion tool. It uses a swfml markup which is “closely modeled after the swf file format”. It’s been released under a GPL (General Public License).
I wonder how many Authorware users think “hmm, Authorware outputs to xml…” each time we hear about the various describe swf in xml applications.
