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Among the numerous Flash anniversary posts of the past few days I especially enjoyed reading John Dowdell’s reminiscence on the first 10 years of Flash.

One of the anecdotes he shares described Flex as the fulfillment of a quest for an authoring environment that uses XML to natively describe multimedia “experiences” and once again reminded me of what I’m starting to think of as “Authorware’s past glories”. When Authorware 7 was released in 2003 it included functionality that allows one to export (and import) an XML description of Authorware files. (Sadly, it remains just too incomplete to fulfill it’s true potential). Nevertheless, while JD does a good job of connecting the XML dots to Flex it bears noting that Authorware was also a dot on that path.

Authorware, a dot in so many ways.

Last month Sys-Con Media posted an interesting interview (brace yourself before clicking - ads on that page tend to get in your face) with Adobe General Manager David Mendels. One of the first points David makes addresses a question about “hiccups” during the Adobe acquisition of Macromedia. He does a great job of dismissing the suggestion, mentioning that any hiccups are “internal”. I have no doubt this may be the case from a Flash or Flex perspective however I think that a few Macromedia products and groups actually have stumbled under Adobe’s guidance.

While eLearning wasn’t exactly a primary focus at Macromedia they did have a few of the leading tools for developing learning content (Captivate, Authorware, Director…), people (Tom King) and even an “enterprise solution” (Breeze). Add Flash and Dreamweaver to the mix and they had a reasonable offering for the broad spectrum that is “eLearning”. While some of the tools are becoming long in the tooth and had languished, (to a degree), with small dev teams and little marketing there was also strong community involvement from MM folks. In many cases this was the product developers themselves out in forums and on mailing lists supporting users. Unfortunately, it would seem that has changed under Adobe’s watch. The fact that Adobe recently felt the need to release a set of FAQ documents stating a degree of commitment to the continued development of these tools really makes it apparent. What can be said about the state of your community relations if one the most frequently asked questions about a product is ‘what’s going on’ ?

To be fair to David the interview was focused on his Enterprise and Developer group and most specifically Flex and large scale application development. However, it is worth pointing out that as these large business applications are built, as rich and collaborative as they are, the organizations that own them will be looking for ways to get employees up to speed on ways to use them effectively. This will become even more true as tools like Apollo come about and even further change the way people do their jobs.

As a developer I find it kind of ironic that I’m thinking about this so much. While the development I do is training related, I really consider myself more of a developer who happens to develop training rather than a trainer who develops. Because of that however, I tend to subscribe to mailing lists and read forums / newsgroups where some of the true eLearning thinkers are and from my perspective a good number are becoming increasingly frustrated with Adobe’s apparent neglect of the tools and communities they use.

Now, the good thing about hiccups is that there are a number of simple “cures“…

Adobe’s Tom Higgins is pointing to a new Macromedia Director and Adobe Shockwave Player FAQ on the Adobe website:
http://www.adobe.com/products/director/special/crossproduct/faq.html

Most significant is that Adobe is expecting a new Director release in 2007 and are committed to continued investment and development.

With 14 of the 21 FAQ items dedicated to the Google Toolbar bundled offered with Shockwave Player I wonder if the document would be more aptly named the Macromedia Director, Adobe Shockwave Player and Google Toolbar FAQ.

The Article I Think I Read
I burned a good hour of time that I didn’t really have today looking for an article that I’m pretty sure I read a few years ago. The way I recall things it was sometime in maybe 2002, the article was published on macromedia.com and it described a fictional “day in the life” in which the principal “character” was helped in their day to day routines by various “intelligent”, occasionally connected devices and software. Things like reading and writing email, buying concert tickets, tracking current events and making social plans all being done while she made her way to the coffee shop, rode a train to the office etc. A vision that’s pretty common today but back when I read this article it all seemed quite revolutionary to me and ever since I’ve been watching for it to become reality.

Did Kevin Read the Article?
In October I was lucky enough to be sitting in the audience during Kevin Lynch’s keynote at Macromedia’s Max when he first talked about “Apollo”. Something tells me Kevin read the article too. Here, go check out the video from that keynote and you’ll see how familiar it sounds. Choose ‘Day One’ > ‘Platform Future’ (3rd thumbnail from the right), then jump ahead to around 1:08:00 (yup, the ability to direct link that would be easier for me too).

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Yeah, so it’s not really a New Years resolution, but with today’s release of the Flash Lite 2 update for Flash on Adobe Labs I think 2006 is the year I attempt to build a Flash Lite app.

I’ve never really considered trying to develop for devices until now. I actually sat in on one of the Flash Lite sessions at Max this year and while I found it very infomative I can’t say I was eager to jump into Flash Lite development. The old Flash 4 AS syntax of Flash Lite 1.1, the limited data transfer, device inconsistencies, and those crazy memory and filesize constraints all just make it so unattractive. Obviously Flash Lite 2 won’t solve all of these but hopefully it’ll be enough to make things alot less painful. Check out Bill Perry’s Flash Lite 2.0 Preview for a good Breeze presentation on the new features.

There, now I’ve pledged to it. Hopefully this post won’t be haunting me in December…

Browsing through the various tributes to Macromedia that folks are sharing as the Adobe aquisition is finalized I was reminded of Macromedia: the story put together back in 2002 for their 10th anniversary:
http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/story/

This image from that work seemed too good to pass up. (If anyone knows the story behind it it’d be cool to hear).

Last clip in the piece has then CEO Rob Burgess with one of those generic “just watch us” statements:

We’ve got some wild ideas about what’s going to happen here in the next few years, and its really going to be an unbelievable time for innovation.

Yesterday had that calm after the storm feeling. MAX wrapped up on Wednesday and I spent a good part of the day thinking about my reactions to it …

I’m happy to have been able to put faces to a good number of names. Unfortunately there are a few folks that I just never seemed to be able to catch up with. Attendance this year was in the neighbourhood of 3000 people so I guess that’s to be expected. One thing’s for sure though - there are alot of really cool people out there doing some really cool things and the opportunity to meet some of them and just hang out was inspiring. “Zat alone is worth zee price of zee conference”. (Sorry Joe, I’m too lazy to work out decent phonetics).

I’m also pretty excited about some of the new things coming from Macromedia. Which I guess is a pretty natural reaction - I’d imagine something to that effect is at the top of the objectives whiteboard in MAX planning meetings, (a Breeze meeting collaborative whiteboard no doubt). For now atleast I’m going to take a pass on simply listing the things that have me so enthusiastic. I’d probably just wind up rattling off a bunch of product codenames and confuse myself. Again. (I know I’m getting too old for this but there’s a great drinking game in all those codenames - someone just needs to hammer out a few rules).

What really stuck with me coming from the conference is a sense of how things in this internet application space seem to be accelerating. Web 2.0 indeeed. It would seem to me that nearly everyone I’ve talked with whether they do elearning, web (or desktop) applications, mobile, web design, you name it, is excited and optimistic about the near future. I didn’t really get the impression from anyone that they had their foot on the brake.
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Phew. Delivered the 1.0 of a project just a couple of hours ago.

I’m leaving for Macromedia’s MAX in the morning.

Couldn’t of planned things better ;-)

Wow, what a week. Way back on Tuesday Macromedia released Studio 8 and the Flash Player 8. Then on Wednesday Microsoft announced Sparkle. Topping things off is a looming deadline at work which makes me even more grateful for the distillation folks have been providing. So here’s a collection of Sparkle reactions that I’ve found interesting.

Robert Scoble started the week off by saying that Sparkle is no Flash killer.

The Expression Suite press release is here.

Of course the Channel9 video. A 1+ hour, nearly 1 gig, .wmv of Scoble lobbing softballs at members of the Sparkle team. Freakin’ inspiring and worth the entire hour. Something cool about what they’re doing over on Channel9 - the content is genuine. No editing when software or people slip from the “script”.

Macromedia’s John Dowdell trudged through comments on Slashdot’s “Flash, meet Sparkle” article and linked to those he considered noteworthy. (Thanks JD!).

Jon Meyer, who at one time was a PM on Sparkle, has an interesting point of view. He seems to be suggesting it is the ubiquity of Ajax that is the main threat to Sparkle. He also mentions Flash a half dozen or so times and there’s some good discussion in the comments section.

Sparkle vs Flash on publish.com. Interestingly Matthew David feels that the term Flash-killer should be hyphenated. Seriously, it’s a decent read. (Tom Adams pointed this one out).

Eweek has another blurb by Matthew David on Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere (WPF/E).

Dax Pandhi thinks about programming power and predicts that “WPF/E will most probably revamp the Internet itself“.

I think Scott Barnes feels the same way. Regardless, the enthusiasm makes it worth the read.

Peter Elst looks at Sparkle from a Flash user’s perspective.

Víctor Bayón thinks about how Window’s Vista is part of the Nike-ization of the software industry. The focus shift being from the functionality of the OS to the user experience. He points out that Sparkle is how MS see that shift being made:
http://www.virart.nott.ac.uk/idue/eng/weblog/2005/09/experience-iii.html

Tinic Uro, who is an engineer on the Flash Player, was at PDC and got a look at Sparkle:
http://www.kaourantin.net/2005/09/microsoft-sparkle.html

Okay this one isn’t on topic Sparkle wise but Molly Holzschlag takes Steve Ballmer to task for declaring that Microsoft will “win the web”:
http://webstandards.org/buzz/archive/2005_09.html#a000573

Avner Acquisition Sub, Inc. is the name of the Adobe subsidiary that will be merged with Macromedia according to the Securities and Exchange Commission filings from the original Adobe - Macromedia aquistion anouncement.

Seems to be a wise move on Avner Acquisition’s part - their soon-to-be colleagues could probably help ‘em out with a website.

;-)

So many reasons to keep an eye on the Adobe blogs launched last week.

Obviously it’s great to see Adobe open up this line of communication. One of the main concerns Macromedia developers have expressed in regards to the pending acquisition is the (apparent) contrast between the two companies when it comes to fostering community interaction. This move would seem to indicate that Adobe is moving closer to the Macromedia end of the spectrum.

It will also be interesting to watch the Adobe bloggers gain their “sea legs” (blog legs?) as the inevitable ’slip ups’ are made, controversies flare and (most importantly) insight is shared. So far it would seem things bode well (check the comments in this post on John Nack’s blog for an indication of the “culture shift”).

In another post John (who is the product manager for Photoshop) also throws some props to the Flash Player guys.

It would seem that in a way an unofficial amalgamation has begun.

Forbes.com is running an interview with Macromedia CEO Stephen Elop. It gives a good recap of this (one time) Canadian boy’s career to date.

No idea what this means (if anything) but it seems that Stephen Elop moved to the CEO position in January when Rob Burgess stepped down to focus on mergers and aquisitions. Within weeks, he (Elop) was talking to rival Adobe Systems about a $3.4 billion merger..(link).

(That Rob Burgess bio on MM is out of date as is the executive profiles page).

Via: photoshopnews.com

Update: FWIW, a more up to date executive bio page can be found here:
http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/management/exec_bios/

At one point this afternoon nearly the entire front page of MXNA was discussing Macromedia’s upcoming Eclipse based development tool for the Flex framework, codenamed Zorn.

All due to a post from Mike Chambers in which he explains that Zorn will allow users to build swfs with MXML, ActionScript and the next generation of the Flex framework (all without requiring a server).

Macromedia have made a public beta of Flash Player 8 available.

Would be wise to run any existing content through it and report any issues.

Mike and Christian have posted the second Macromedia Developer Relations podcast. In it they mention that they’re going to try and make it a weekly event. That would be fantastic though I imagine it takes some time to prepare a piece as “juicy” as these first two. Then again with all the stuff going on at Macromedia these days I imagine they’ll have alot of material for some time to come.

In this episode Mike Downey, (Product Manager for Flash), chats with the guys about the upcoming updates to the Flash Player and IDE. He gives an interesting overview of some of the steps along the road to getting Flash out the door. (For those marking calendars, Mike Chambers seems to imply the updates will ship prior to the Max event in October).

A vibe I got from this podcast is how these guys aren’t just colleagues doing a job - they’re pals who have a genuine passion for what they’re doing. Sounds clichéd I know but give it a listen and see if you catch it too.

See the Developer Relations podcast blog for a full list of topics covered and a link to the mp3.

About frikin’ time.

Christian Cantrell and Mike Chambers have put together the first Macromedia developer relations podcast. This first episode seems to be an excellent use of the technology. Let’s hope it becomes a regular thing.

Re the content - It’s very cool to hear Mark Anders talking about the way he sees MM taking more of a participant role in community development of Flash tools, (as opposed to only wanting to dictate).

(And no, I’m not really complaining with that ‘it’s about time’ dig. In my mind Macromedia have a very strong “early adopter” image).

Mark Anders who is leading the Zorn project for Macromedia has started blogging.

It seems Mark was one of the creators of ASP.Net.

I pointed to the beta Flash / JavaScript Integration Kit from Macromedia last week. Earlier today Mike Chambers who co-authored the kit announced that it has been released under a license based on the Apache 1.1 Software license. Its text is available here.

There is some real momentum building in the open source Flash community and it’s nice to see Macromedia encouraging (and particpating in) it.

Macromedia have announced that they’ll start referring to Flash as a platform. Seems to be getting linked alot for a move that at the end of the day is pretty much just a marketing initiative. (Not to say it isn’t a wise move - bound to help in the flash as a web application technology initiative).

Probably the tidbits on the upcoming Flash Player that are part of the platform overview pdf are helping to generate some of that excitement.

As well as the announcement that Macromedia have joined the Eclipse foundation and are planning a RIA development tool in the form of an Eclipse plugin. It seems that it will be a replacment for FlexBuilder. Atleast to begin with - some comments in Sho Kuwamoto’s blog could lead one to believe that they are considering something similar for (non-Flex) Flash application development.

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.

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.

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?

;-)

No doubt still a little raw following the “not bundling, just offering” Yahoo! toolbar fiasco Macromedia seem to be taking the initiative by providing information in response to some recent Flash local object privacy rumblings. Local objects, often called “Flash cookies”, are used to store data locally - very much like the browser cookie functionality. There is a new Flash Player technote, How to disable Local Shared Objects, and John Dowdell has been thinking about some of the concerns recently.

According to this techweb.com piece, some of the internet marketing outfits are beginning to use Flash local objects as an alternative to cookies following a recent study which claims that a large percentage of users are deleting cookies on a regular basis. I think the bottom line is that local objects seem to be no more, nor no less, nefarious than cookies and users should be informed about how to manage both (as well as why they would want to). Apparently Macromedia is also talking with the major browser developers with a goal of integrating cookie and shared object managment.That would be useful. In the meantime manage your local object and other Flash Player settings here:
http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager02.html
Also, here is a link to information on managing cookies in FireFox:
http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/options#privacy
And for Internet Explorer too:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q283185

All that said, I do have a couple of questions / observations about Flash local objects and browser cookies:
Are the Flash Player settings machine (as opposed to browser) specific? Meaning if I change my settings using Firefox do the same settings apply under IE?
Flash local objects default to a maximum size of 100KB and can be configured from 0KB to “unlimited”. It would appear that cookies are limited to 4KB. Is this correct?
Are the browser cookie file format(s) published? How about Flash Player local objects?

I’ll do my best to find some answers to these when I have a little bit more time If anyone happens to find this and has some answers I’d be interested in hearing them…

With tongue in cheek I put together a toolbar button for Internet Explorer that unselects the Yahoo toolbar checkbox on the Flash Player download page. That’s right, it’s a toolbar that helps you to opt-out of the Yahoo! toolbar offer from Macromedia. Call it statement-ware. Basically, it runs a bit of javascript on the page to set the checked state of the “also install” checkbox to false when the IE toolbar button is clicked. Really this provides no added functionality to the page (nor removes any).

What’s the point you ask? There is no point except to make a statement. I’ve followed (and participated in) the Yahoo! toolbar debate that has recently been waged and while I feel encouraged by the way Macromedia have reacted to the developer community feedback I continue to disagree with the offer’s opt-in status. Of course, the absurdity of a toolbar item to deselect an option to install a toolbar is also part of the point. As another explanation I’d suggest that perhaps I have too much time on my hands but that really is far from the truth.

I’ve assembled the files in a zip here. It contains the following:
y_opt_out.ico - the toolbar button’s icon (a rather lame effort…).
y_opt_out.js - the script file that is executed when the toolbar button is clicked.
y_opt_out.reg - a reg file to assist in the toolbar button installation (direct linking a reg file just seemed wrong). Basically it adds a registry key in
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Extensions\
Before merging it you’ll need to edit the directory location for the values it contains to point to the location on your pc where the above files will be located (currently pointing to D:\y_opt_out\).

Here’s a screengrab of the toolbar in IE6:

And this is a link to the MSDN docs for Internet Explorer browser extensions:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/browser/ext/extensions.asp

Eric Dolecki points out that there are a few Macromedia related blogs running in stealth mode as of late. I too have noticed a reduction of atleast Flash related content from some of the blogs I try to follow. Personally I put it down to the fact that most of the folk are busy donating their ‘community’ time to beta testing. That and it’s probably difficult to blog while under an NDA.

I have no metrics to back this up so it could just be wishful thinking. Being under no such restrictions I can ponder this openly.

Some interesting Macromedia Macrochats this month:
Partial Page Caching in ColdFusion MX
Debugging Director Movies Using the alertHook Command
Flash Video Basics Macrochat

MacroChats are online presentations from Macromedia done in Breeze Live. There is a chat while the presentation is being made so some specific questions can get answered. They’re usually limited to about 200 participants so it’s good to get yourself registered (but only register if you can make it so as to not waste a spot).

Previously recorded Macrochats are archived here:
http://www.macromedia.com/community/macrochats.html

Last month I mentioned that I’d subscribed to the syndication feeds of a couple Macromedia Livedocs books. Since then I’ve been occasionally browsing through some of the comments / feedback left on the docs by users. I see it as just another way to keep up on some of the tools I use, much like reading the user forums or mailing lists I’m subscribed to. It’s also somewhat interesting to see how people are using the livedocs and I’ve noted a few trends.

Alot of folks seem to use Livedocs much like they do the support forums - to ask for help. Probably not terribly effective but not that surprising either. However, on a couple of occasions I also followed an issue on a mailing list as it developed and came to a resolution and then later noticed a comment describing that solution dropped on the LD. That seems more in keeping with the spirit of the tool - users providing genuine documentation input.

I don’t have any metrics to back this up but I would guess that skinning components in Flash generates the most traffic of the two feeds I’ve been following (Flash and Authorware). It’s also a topic that seems to make folks cranky. Which leads me to another trend - the ranting. It would seem that the occasional person sees LDs as a bit of an anonymous medium for communicating directly with Macromedia. In some small way I take pity on the poor misguided soul - he (or she) is obviously in the docs as a last resort and completely exasperated. That “add comment” button must just be too damned tempting. There are probably a couple of maintainers of the Livedocs who deserve to have a beer or two bought for them (like Francis Cheng for this effort - scroll to the Feb 10, 2005 comments).

Finally, there are the just plain bizarre entries like this comment in the Authorware book:

Is there a dedicated speed light for the new Nikon F6?

It was dropped on this page but has been edited out so won’t appear in the link. I think its the context that cracks me up so much.

Macromedia Central seems to have gone quite dark as of late. Perhaps it’s just the blogs that I read but the only real discussions I’ve seen regarding Central in the past month or so have been on its less than promising future. The counter argument seems to run along the lines of it currently being a developer release, and that Central 2.0 will be the turning point. Unfortunately for Central, a number of the blogs I read also come out of Macromedia and they seem to have fallen awfully silent in its regard. Take a look at some of the community resources linked from the Central dev center. Looks like a bit of a ghost town with engineer weblogs last updated in January 2004 and a couple of “a-thread-or-two” forums.

Contrast this with the way the next generation of the Flash player and IDE are being hyped and marketed by Macromedia. They have been incredibly open about where 8ball is headed, (word is it’s now in beta), demoing it at pretty much every MM related event for the past 6 months or so. Can it really be that the entire company is soley focused on this Flash release or that they’ve made some sort of concious decision that any news coming out of Macromedia will only be Flash related?

Disclosure here - I’m a developer and I’ve never built a Central application. If in your view that means I don’t have the cred to comment on it’s future that’s fine with me. Just remember, I am a user as well and this is how I regard the platform. And even more disclosure - I do appreciate the irony of someone who uses Authorware on a daily basis commenting on the “tottering” of a package.

I’ll continue to keep my eye on Central as I feel the concept has potential but at this point expectations are low. I really wouldn’t mind being the one in the dark here.

When installing one of the Macromedia web players in IE have you ever selected the “Always trust content from Macromedia, Inc.” checkbox and now you want to re-enable the dialog?

(pre XP SP2)

From the Tools menu of Internet Explorer 6, select Internet Options.
On the Content tab, click Publishers.
From here you can view and remove trusted publishers.

You can find the digital certificate chapter from the IE6 resource kit here.

Macromedia recently added rss feeds and email notifications to livedocs. It seems that currently the rss links are only available on pages containing an existing comment. However, by taking a cue from Christian Cantrell’s suggestion (linked above) of fiddling with the feed urls it seems to be possible to subscribe to an entire “book” as well. So I’ve added the Authorware 7 and Flash MX 2004 feeds to my reader to try it out. I actually dropped a small (legit) comment on an Authorware page as a simple test and it came up in the rss reader. I’ll probably unsubscribe if information overload sets in (or worse, some cretin realizes they can feed spam us by dumping their garbage in the docs).

Christian and the rest of the IMD(?) team have been providing us with some nice alternative ways of getting up to date information off the Macromedia servers.

There are interesting parallel discussions happening on a couple of mailing lists I subscribe to. On both Aware and Flashcoders folks are pointing out the shortcomings of the text rendering engines in the respective products. There is no question that Flash is miles ahead of Authorware in this respect and the main complaint with Flash is the lack of right-to-left (RTL) support. While 8-ball (the version of flash currently in development) will include a new Saffron based text rendering engine (source: one, two, three, four, five, six) it would appear that RTL will still not be supported. David Mendels, who manages the Flash product groups, mentioned that the main obstacles are getting it right (apparently it’s a big challenge and therefore risky) as well as the filesize it would add to the player.

Authorware complaints are a bit less “focused” in that there isn’t one single feature everyone wants to see supported. Honestly speaking the text handling in Authorware is quite antiquated and probably in need of a complete overhaul. Even some of the (considered) basic stuff such as dynamic formatting isn’t possible. In the light of all this, the Authorware solution sounds simple - how’s about “dropping” Saffron into Authorware 8. Hell, I’d settle for the Flash MX’04 engine using the better the devil you know argument. I make it sound trivial which it most definitely is not, but if something’s going to be done then what I suggest may have advantages.

Anyhow, all this to make the suggestion that perhaps Macromedia has some cross product shortcomings?

Some time ago I updated the using FlashPaper in Authorware sample that Chris Phillips I and had originally written for the Macromedia Exchange. I just noticed that while the description of the item on the Exchange describes v2, the file being downloaded is still the original version. So until the update is properly linked from the Exchange I’ll share a copy here. (Please note that I will edit this post to remove that non Exchange link once everything is back in sync).

The sample demonstrates one technique for enabling communication to and from a swf inserted in authorware. Basically allowing you to call all of the available flashpaper 2.0 api methods from within authorware as well as to trap flashpaper events.

FlashPaper can be a handy way to display and print static documents from within your Authorware pieces. If you’re not familiar with FlashPaper you can find out about it here.