An Enhanced Flash Player?
I just caught this over on MacNN: SWF Movie Player is being billed as a “smart” Flash Player for MacOS. When I first saw the post, I assumed it was something like Gnash, which is an entirely separate Flash Player built from the ground up. But it looks like it is simply an enhancement for Flash Movies. I don’t know if it runs as a SWF, or if it somehow interacts with the browser to enable the functionality.
The idea of a separate Flash Player is interesting. A lot of folks hope Gnash, and open source SWF movie player, can come up to speed with the current Flash Player so that Linux folks have an open source alternative to Adobe’s player. SWF is an open standard, but because of the license associated with the SWF SDK, you can’t use it to reverse-engineer the player. For Adobe, having a bunch of fragmented players around that all display Flash movies is a very bad thing because it can make for a poor user experience if the players aren’t consistent.
I am in the process of setting up an interview with the person behind Gnash for ZDNet, because I’m curious to get his thoughts. This product seems entirely different, but it’s based upon the already established Flash ecosystem. If this takes off, I think it could have mixed results for Adobe. Worth tracking.
[tags]Flash, SWF Movie Player, Flash Platform, Gnash[/tags]
Posted in Rich Internet Applications
November 1st, 2006 at 4:26 am
This is bad news for Flash developers.
The last thing we need is to worry about non-standard versions of Flash players. One of the things that drew me to developing for Flash is the neglible need to worry about the player acting differently across various user environments.
November 1st, 2006 at 8:36 am
I went to their website last night, and didn’t really find solid information about what they were doing, but I don’t think we need to worry about forking the audience capabilities here.
Eltima used phrases like “Based on the standard Macromedia Flash player” and such, which makes me suspect they wrote a native-code shell which invokes the Adobe Flash Player in its Netscape Plugin wrapper. The “ExternalInterface” API can then be used for message-passing (rewind, etc). Some clearer docs would help, but if they’re asking consumers to move Adobe Flash Player to their app’s “Netscape Plugins” folder, then there’s no degradation of audience capabilities.
Gnash is a different case, because they’re explicitly writing their own SWF renderer. Recently their home page has changed to say Adobe Flash Player is a security risk because it can make network calls like XmlHttpRequest does in browsers, and I think there’s something wrong with advertising their product like that. But I understood a lot more when I saw Rob Savoye speak — it filled in the background for me of how he thinks:
http://tech.netscape.com/story/2006/10/03/oreilly-eurooscon-rob-savoye-of-gnash/
November 1st, 2006 at 8:52 am
I think you’re right John. Looking at the screenshots it looks like a desktop app, not a browser plugin. so, nothing to worry about for Flash developers.
March 8th, 2007 at 8:40 am
paul. we need standards. we suffer poor implementations of those standards. but if the suffering is in the name of a standard to become universal and free, please let us suffer a bit more.
in fact most of your sufferings are related with companie$ not following opens standards.
March 19th, 2007 at 9:26 pm
Chi ha fatto questo? E un buon posto per trovare le informazioni importanti!:)