I’m absolutely agree with you. That’s first smart point of view from the time that Sparkle stormed trough the web headlines.
I love Flash, but the main task of developer is to bring better user-experience to users/customers, so if Sparkle will do its job better I would develop in Sparkle. And saying truly, Macromedia needs some wholesome competition to advance in the right direction.
Browsing articles from "September, 2005"
Allow smoothing for Bitmaps
Just a quick note since I’ve not seen anyone blogging about this, but Flash 8 does miracles to pictures when scaling (well, compared to Flash 7 anyhow). Remember that "Allow smoothing"-check-box when opening the properties of a imported picture which really did not do much to increase quality? Well in Flash 8 it does. If you set _quality to "high" or "best", bitmaps with the "Allow smoothing"-property set are now really smooth when scaling and/or rotating. Bitmap edges are now even anti-aliased with the background.
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Sparkle, quit it already
No, I’m not going to argue whether Sparkle will kill Flash or not, I think everything that can be said has been said already. But I must say that I find it odd that so many are afraid of… err… progress. I mean, why are you guys afraid of something better than Flash to come out, instead of freakishly excited?
I use the tools that make most sense, and if Sparkle (or whatever else…) works better than Flash to get a certain job done, I’m very happy to jump to that solution. Don’t see it as a threat, but as a possibility.
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I agree.
Of course there is many people who have a sentiment against MS, and because of that actually hope that Sparkle will be a bad application.
I think that of course it would be fantastic if it was better than Flash, and would not hesitate to use it instead where applicable.
Before I saw the video presentation I must say that I thought that the only reason it might compete with Flash would be MS marketing machine and the appeal it would have to people already using MS solutions.
I never ever seen an app from MS before that I find exciting, and the reason I have a dislike for MS is that the apps they make simply have been bad.
But it seems like Sparkle will be well worth a look and it’s in my view only positive if a dominant but usually lousy company like MS actually manage to get something nice together. -
I’m not afraid, but surely you can understand that if someone has invested a lot of time and resources into becoming an expert in a particular software package, and something comes along that could potentially (at least in some eyes), become a replacement for that package, it could cause some concern. “Should I dive into this new thing now, so that when it becomes really popular, I’m still on top of the game? But what if it fails, and I wasted all that time?” I think a lot of the Flash community is just trying to get a sense of what Sparkle means to them personally and their future direction.
From what I’ve seen it seems more of a Director killer than a Flash killer (and I think Director could use some euthanasia right about now…). Flash has a lot going for it that I don’t think Sparkle will be able to touch for many years. -
“Flash has a lot going for it that I don’t think Sparkle will be able to touch for many years.”
Based on the channel 9 video, it looks like you could just as easiliy make a case for the opposite. Sparkle has 3D support, hardware acceleration and can be leveraged to create full-blown desktop apps. And it’s still in a pre-release state…who knows what they’ll be adding in the next year.
In any case, I’m optimistic that the competition will be beneficial to developers. But I also understand why people feel threatened by Sparkle. The future has suddenly become more uncertain. -
I highly respect Keith Peters comments in the Flash community, but I must say I’m a little surprised that he is so software-centric. I come from a 3d background so I know the importance of not being software-centric … in the 3d realm you need to be flexible and able to use whatever software would be best for the job at hand. I know the Flash world has had several years of one product and only one product, so everyone is in the “Flash Community”, but wouldn’t you much rather consider yourself part of the “Multimedia Community” instead and Flash is one of many tools to grab from. No matter how great a product is and will be, there is always another product around the corner waiting to take the throne … something that makes the industry so great. I would much rather have my business card say Multimedia Developer rather than Flash Developer, its too specific and seems to narrow your potential abilities.
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Don’t we have enough to worry about, what with Flash X just around the corner. I mean, if it isn’t bad enough that we have to learn AS3.0 already, then what’s the problem with learning some convoluted, proprietary, Microsoft-Only, NonStandard piece of Bloated Software just to stay competitive.
I figure by the time I get Sparkle mastered, Adobe AS5 will be out… And I don’t mind mentioning how much AS5 (or even AS5.0LE {presumably the Limited Edition version of Actionscript 5.0}) looks a lot like…well, you get picture.
Honestly, I do agree with you, but I kinda felt obligated to, albeit sarcastically, support the panic and mania induced by the introduction of anything labelled as a “Flash Killer”. Besides all the great things that Sparkle is supposed to be able to do, when is it ever going to be released? By the time it is ready for public consumption, I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t actually just a Flash Extension…or perhaps by then it will be compiled from some FlashOS supercompiler…Until I get the beta and can work with it, it’s all hype to me.
Great blog btw.
jase
Got my Studio 8
Big kudos to Developer Dispatch, they wrote of a rumour that DevNet subscribers could download Studio 8. And luckily I remembered that we received a DevNet subscription when we joined the Macromedia Alliance Partner program. Yep, there it was, and currently downloading. I still find it weird that a rumour made me check our DevNet subscription and not an email from Macromedia. Well, good news travels fast.
To be or not to be…
To be or not to be… That is not a good question, since it’s kind of obvious if you’re not self-destructive. How about: To code or to design? There are not many programmers out there, who can combine both, and in my mind that’s sad. Programmers actually implement the stuff that the designers come up with, but I think the best person to implement a design is the inventor of the design. In some way, competence in implementation gives the programmer a better basis to start designing – he knows the possibilities of the technical environment, and in the best case this should not limit him, but give him a great platform to innovate from.
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Correct…
mCOM components finally available
mCOM aka GLIC components have finally been released. What’s it been, a year since they were first announced? Anyhow they work beautifully – definetly the best set of basic components out there.
Flash & authenticity of hi-scores
Every time we create a campaign that contains some sort of game with a high score list we end up thinking about a perfect solution to keep cheaters out – especially if there are any good prizes to win.
The problem is always the same: How can we make sure that a score submitted has really been achieved playing fair? The weakest link is usually the part where Flash tells our back-end the actual score. There are a few ways of posting scores that we’ve used:
- Issue a HTTP GET to the server, like savescore.php?username=someone&score=200.
- Issue a HTTP POST to post the score.
- Use some sort of cryptography. The Flash-client will make a initial call the the back-end, which will return a key. The flash client will then compute a hash-code using the actual score as well as the key (combining both in a pre-defined manner) and send the user name, score as well as hash-code back to the back-end. The back-end can then use the same method to construct the hash-code to check if it matches the one send by the (alleged) Flash-movie.
Even a novice user would be able to hack both the GET and POST methods using a simple HTTP sniffer and issuing a spoof HTTP call to the back-end.
The third one is far more complex. Sniffing at HTTP Traffic between client and server would not enable anyone to spoof the score, since the hash-code is used to authenticate the submission (make sure that the client has used the same algorithm as the server). But if the Prize is good enough, one could go through the trouble to decompile the Flash-movie and find out how it actually posts the score and create a new client that could be used to spoof scores.
Obfuscation makes it hard and making the algorithm that creates the hash-code more complex – maybe even dividing it up into multiple Flash-movies – would make it yet harder to break, but it would still be breakable.
What kind of measures do you undertake to ensure authenticity of hi-scores?
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The new smoothing functionality is fantastic – BUT! It doesn’t work when you load in an image because you can’t set the “Allow smoothing” property in ActionScript. This is a MAJOR flaw.
Future versions of applications like flickr.com if they decide to use Flash Player 8 will get pixelated (aliased) images because there’s no way to smooth them.
I’ve mentioned this on Tinic Uro’s blog as well, hopefully we can get a fix for this soon… http://www.kaourantin.net/2005/08/fixing-one-bug-at-time-in-flash-player.html
In order to get loaded in images to have smoothing turned on you’ll need to use the BitmapData class, but it is rather annoying to have to do this (unless I’m missing something).
You can also safe the image in a separate swf that has the same size as the image. In that swf turn allow smoothing on and then load the swf instead of the image. Works fine, it’s just much more work…
If you really needed the image to be resized when flash gets it, couldn’t you just write a quick PHP script to download new images, resize/scale/smooth them, and feed them to your flash app?
This is assuming you have a server somewhere with PHP support and some PHP experience, but what self respecting flash developer doesn’t have both of those things. With the wealth of tutorials on PHP on the internet and all the free/cheap server space available, this should be easy to setup for firs timers.
Do like Einstein said. Don’t try to solve problems, try to avoid them.