May I ask if you have any more info to share to buttress that claim? Is it only due to Flash, or do you also have other info about the other software titles... mainly FreeHand, but maybe also Fireworks development trash?
Yes...
Director, Dreamweaver, Shockwave, Authorware, amongst others. Macromedia's problem was much like that of Adobe's... They acquired several flagship products from various companies and then slowly rewrote them all without making any improvements where they really needed them - they just stuffed more stupid features in. It was hardly something unique to Macromedia. As they say, 'everyone was doing it.' Arguably, Microsoft was king of shoving pointless features into products, though they tended to just kill them off when they finally got a proper following. Adobe did the same thing, but they just doggedly trudged along, year after year, after year, and show no signs of letting up. What made Macromedia stand out was that they took moderately good products that had great potential, then did everything they could muster to make them crappy. I will admit I had never liked the company, so if there is anything good to be said about any of their products, you need to ask someone else. It's been so long since I dealt with them, I really can't remember anything positive I might have felt. shrug.
With regard to Splash, I don't think this is correct. As I recall .spa files could not be opened in a text editor. Those were binary files. Future Splash files were created by the Splash editor application.
I may be wrong - we are looking back nearly 20 years... My memory is fuzzy these days, but as I recall, Splash OPTIONALLY created binaries. Actually, as I recall, they started out as plain text, and later adopted compiled binaries.
Quote:
They were drawn not coded. Ironically Javascript and Flash do have a lot in common. They are both based on EMCIAscript. Javascript and ActionScript 1-2 were almost identical. Now with ActionScript 3 they are not as similar but still closely related.
ECMAScript is a common basis to JavaScript and ActionScript, true, but that is where the comparison ends. Flash is NOT ActionScript. ActionScript is to Flash, what JavaScript is to HTML5. It's the instructions for animation, interactions, etc. It is not Flash itself. I have no familiarity with ActionScript or Flash for at least the past decade, so I suppose Adobe has extended and evolved it in some ways, but based on it's huge security issues, they have not done anything actually worth keeping it for. Incidentally, I have been a staunch anti-Flash crusader since it's inception, though not the least of which, that was due to a pure hatred of Macromedia, the company, and every product they ever offered, if for no other reason than the company's name on the box. Petty? Yes, positively. But, years of headaches and working several days into the middle of the night to fix something caused by a stupid software glitch really started to wear me down!
Incidentally, I long endorsed (as if it mattered, as I am really a nobody) a solution that is effectively HTML5 today.
MacroMind Director was a brilliant application. I wrote a lot of cool stuff with it back in the day.
Personally, I recall Director was a severely flawed tool that in the hands of a skilled and dedicated creative person, could be coaxed into creating some great stuff, but I genuinely feel that Director was more a hindrance than a benefit. The thing is, there was very little competing with it - at least very little that did not run on proprietary hardware or dying platforms such as the Amiga, anyhow.
If you created great stuff, then you deserve all the credit for making Director work for you! I spent long weeks fixing problems caused by Director. I am so glad that those days are over two decades away in my rear view mirror!
One other thought: HTML has always been a clear text programming language interpreted in the browser. A lot of people think that HTML5 is something entirely new and a replacement for Flash in that it can do all the animations. HTML5 just adds a few new tags to the HTML standard. The part that is doing all the animation and fancy visuals is Javascript and CSS3. Sure HTML5 adds the video tag making Flash unnecessary for that, but the proper way to refer to the new advanced object style of web programming would be HTML5/JS/CSS3, not just HTML5. I realize that may be putting too fine of a point on it, but I just thought I would mention it.
You are absolutely precisely right... As you might have noticed, increasing typos started to appear at that point in my diatribe. I was being interrupted and rushed to finish.
I tried this and it works, but on Comedy Central's Daily Show it only plays the opening video and doesn't progress to the ads like it does on my iPhone, the continue playing the episode.
You can easily play content in Safari by going to the Develop menu > User Agent > Safari iOS x.x - iPad. Since iOS devices don't use Flash many websites fall back to HTML5 content for mobile devices, so tricking a website into thinking it's running on an iPad should load the HTML5 content. Works fine for me for playing Flash video on many sites.
I tried this and it works, but on Comedy Central's Daily Show it only plays the opening video and doesn't progress to the ads like it does on my iPhone, then continue playing the episode. Any other solutions?
Some sites won't load their HTML equivalent if flash is disabled for some reason, but you can enable the Developer menu in Safari and tell Safari to advertise it is an iPad, iPhone, etc when that happens. I have one site at work that they just won't get updated. I actually leave all plug-ins disabled and only turn it on for the very rare occasion that I need to use one. So once I enable them, then my whitelist is used. Plus by doing that sites usually load the plug-in free experience.
Personally, I recall Director was a severely flawed tool that in the hands of a skilled and dedicated creative person, could be coaxed into creating some great stuff, but I genuinely feel that Director was more a hindrance than a benefit. The thing is, there was very little competing with it - at least very little that did not run on proprietary hardware or dying platforms such as the Amiga, anyhow.
If you created great stuff, then you deserve all the credit for making Director work for you! I spent long weeks fixing problems caused by Director. I am so glad that those days are over two decades away in my rear view mirror!
You are seriously out of touch with history. Director was a killer application. I don't think you were actually there based on your comments. I find comments that are inspired by personal hateful bias directed at Flash, Adobe, Macromedia, Microsoft as completely useless because those posts reflect selective memory. In the past we were making tons of CDRom software installers for major companies and also many product tutorials using Director distributed on CD during the 90s. Totally insecure because we could write files anywhere but at that time Director authors were a reputable bunch. At that time the software was not available for export so that also helped limit the security risk. Honestly I wish we still had that type of export restrictions but that seriously limit Apple's bottom line even if it helped protect our vulnerability to foreign exploitation.
You are seriously out of touch with history. Director was a killer application. I don't think you were actually there based on your comments. I find comments that are inspired by personal hateful bias directed at Flash, Adobe, Macromedia, Microsoft as completely useless because those posts reflect selective memory. In the past we were making tons of CDRom software installers for major companies and also many product tutorials using Director distributed on CD during the 90s. Totally insecure because we could write files anywhere but at that time Director authors were a reputable bunch.
All memories are selective. You select the good ones in respect to Director and MM authoring. I select the negative ones. I guess that makes me a pessimist. I'll accept that label. I moved on from Director in 1994, and have never looked back. I moved on from Macromedia in 2004. Don't miss them one bit. I moved on from Microsoft in 2005. Don't miss them either. I moved on from Adobe in 2012. Same yet again. They are just software companies, and the products they sold were just tools. They performed a necessary function for the task I was performing at the time. It was not a lifestyle choice. It was just a job. I moved on to bigger and better things. I am proud of my experience, but would not go back to those days for anything. I rarely look back. Instead, I tend to be looking forward. I am pretty happy with the tools I use now for the various tasks I perform, but honestly, there is not a single tool at my disposal that I can't see a better, more efficient way, and can't wait to get to the next thing.
All memories are selective. You select the good ones in respect to Director and MM authoring. I select the negative ones. I guess that makes me a pessimist. I'll accept that label. I moved on from Director in 1994, and have never looked back. I moved on from Macromedia in 2004. Don't miss them one bit. I moved on from Microsoft in 2005. Don't miss them either. I moved on from Adobe in 2012. Same yet again. They are just software companies, and the products they sold were just tools. They performed a necessary function for the task I was performing at the time. It was not a lifestyle choice. It was just a job. I moved on to bigger and better things. I am proud of my experience, but would not go back to those days for anything. I rarely look back. Instead, I tend to be looking forward. I am pretty happy with the tools I use now for the various tasks I perform, but honestly, there is not a single tool at my disposal that I can't see a better, more efficient way, and can't wait to get to the next thing.
You certainly don't impress me as an HTML5 coder or a jQuery expert. I don't think you could put together an SQL query if your life depended on it. You are a total poser in my opinion. The bottom line is, speak directly about your coding experience or STFU. You said you taught programming but all of your comments point to total cluelessness.
I would remove Flash Player, but the problem I'm having is finding an alternative for Firefox that actually works. I have adblock, while that gives me the security benefit of not having unwanted ads being the source of my virus/hacking, that's hardly a complete reassurance.
I also find it funny how the Facebook Security Officer is against Flash, but apparently that doesn't stop Facebook from using it on their videos.
For anyone wanting to use the BBC website without Flash: Enable the "Develop" menu in Safari (the option is in the "Advanced" preferences tab) and then select Develop > User Agent > IOS8.1/iPad. The tab will reload the content as HTML5 and it plays perfectly.
I tried and it doesn't work for me, I just get a never ending red spinner, however Click for Flash does, if on it forces HTML5.
You certainly don't impress me as an HTML5 coder or a jQuery expert. I don't think you could put together an SQL query if your life depended on it. You are a total poser in my opinion. The bottom line is, speak directly about your coding experience or STFU. You said you taught programming but all of your comments point to total cluelessness.
That's odd - it should work. Just for example this news page - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-33517910 - doesn't normally play in Safari without Flash, but change the user agent to IOS/iPad and it does. What pages are you having trouble with and do you maybe have some plug-ins installed that could be preventing it loading?
Why is that better than the Click to Flash option in Safari ? ... I'm genuinely curious not disagreeing. I tried Chrome for ten minutes but Little Snitch lit up like a Christmas tree with all the out going data connections to Google and others. I removed it immediately.
Depends on what you regard as the lesser evil -- letting Chrome take care of sandboxing and updating the plugin, or handing admin privileges to some random Adobe updater service.
I've tried every installer available and my Mac hangs up. This is after I tried installing the new version of Flash Player. I think my Mac is corrupted. The installers just hang up and I have to force quit. I read that the Flash bug may have allowed malware to be installed on my computer. Does anyone know if that is true, and if so, how to get rid of it?
Comments
May I ask if you have any more info to share to buttress that claim? Is it only due to Flash, or do you also have other info about the other software titles... mainly FreeHand, but maybe also Fireworks development trash?
Yes...
Director, Dreamweaver, Shockwave, Authorware, amongst others. Macromedia's problem was much like that of Adobe's... They acquired several flagship products from various companies and then slowly rewrote them all without making any improvements where they really needed them - they just stuffed more stupid features in. It was hardly something unique to Macromedia. As they say, 'everyone was doing it.' Arguably, Microsoft was king of shoving pointless features into products, though they tended to just kill them off when they finally got a proper following. Adobe did the same thing, but they just doggedly trudged along, year after year, after year, and show no signs of letting up. What made Macromedia stand out was that they took moderately good products that had great potential, then did everything they could muster to make them crappy. I will admit I had never liked the company, so if there is anything good to be said about any of their products, you need to ask someone else. It's been so long since I dealt with them, I really can't remember anything positive I might have felt. shrug.
With regard to Splash, I don't think this is correct. As I recall .spa files could not be opened in a text editor. Those were binary files. Future Splash files were created by the Splash editor application.
I may be wrong - we are looking back nearly 20 years... My memory is fuzzy these days, but as I recall, Splash OPTIONALLY created binaries. Actually, as I recall, they started out as plain text, and later adopted compiled binaries.
ECMAScript is a common basis to JavaScript and ActionScript, true, but that is where the comparison ends. Flash is NOT ActionScript. ActionScript is to Flash, what JavaScript is to HTML5. It's the instructions for animation, interactions, etc. It is not Flash itself. I have no familiarity with ActionScript or Flash for at least the past decade, so I suppose Adobe has extended and evolved it in some ways, but based on it's huge security issues, they have not done anything actually worth keeping it for. Incidentally, I have been a staunch anti-Flash crusader since it's inception, though not the least of which, that was due to a pure hatred of Macromedia, the company, and every product they ever offered, if for no other reason than the company's name on the box. Petty? Yes, positively. But, years of headaches and working several days into the middle of the night to fix something caused by a stupid software glitch really started to wear me down!
Incidentally, I long endorsed (as if it mattered, as I am really a nobody) a solution that is effectively HTML5 today.
MacroMind Director was a brilliant application. I wrote a lot of cool stuff with it back in the day.
Personally, I recall Director was a severely flawed tool that in the hands of a skilled and dedicated creative person, could be coaxed into creating some great stuff, but I genuinely feel that Director was more a hindrance than a benefit. The thing is, there was very little competing with it - at least very little that did not run on proprietary hardware or dying platforms such as the Amiga, anyhow.
If you created great stuff, then you deserve all the credit for making Director work for you! I spent long weeks fixing problems caused by Director. I am so glad that those days are over two decades away in my rear view mirror!
One other thought: HTML has always been a clear text programming language interpreted in the browser. A lot of people think that HTML5 is something entirely new and a replacement for Flash in that it can do all the animations. HTML5 just adds a few new tags to the HTML standard. The part that is doing all the animation and fancy visuals is Javascript and CSS3. Sure HTML5 adds the video tag making Flash unnecessary for that, but the proper way to refer to the new advanced object style of web programming would be HTML5/JS/CSS3, not just HTML5. I realize that may be putting too fine of a point on it, but I just thought I would mention it.
You are absolutely precisely right... As you might have noticed, increasing typos started to appear at that point in my diatribe. I was being interrupted and rushed to finish.
I tried this and it works, but on Comedy Central's Daily Show it only plays the opening video and doesn't progress to the ads like it does on my iPhone, the continue playing the episode.
You can easily play content in Safari by going to the Develop menu > User Agent > Safari iOS x.x - iPad. Since iOS devices don't use Flash many websites fall back to HTML5 content for mobile devices, so tricking a website into thinking it's running on an iPad should load the HTML5 content. Works fine for me for playing Flash video on many sites.
I tried this and it works, but on Comedy Central's Daily Show it only plays the opening video and doesn't progress to the ads like it does on my iPhone, then continue playing the episode. Any other solutions?
hulu?
Thanks for the information.
You are seriously out of touch with history. Director was a killer application. I don't think you were actually there based on your comments. I find comments that are inspired by personal hateful bias directed at Flash, Adobe, Macromedia, Microsoft as completely useless because those posts reflect selective memory. In the past we were making tons of CDRom software installers for major companies and also many product tutorials using Director distributed on CD during the 90s. Totally insecure because we could write files anywhere but at that time Director authors were a reputable bunch. At that time the software was not available for export so that also helped limit the security risk. Honestly I wish we still had that type of export restrictions but that seriously limit Apple's bottom line even if it helped protect our vulnerability to foreign exploitation.
You are seriously out of touch with history. Director was a killer application. I don't think you were actually there based on your comments. I find comments that are inspired by personal hateful bias directed at Flash, Adobe, Macromedia, Microsoft as completely useless because those posts reflect selective memory. In the past we were making tons of CDRom software installers for major companies and also many product tutorials using Director distributed on CD during the 90s. Totally insecure because we could write files anywhere but at that time Director authors were a reputable bunch.
All memories are selective. You select the good ones in respect to Director and MM authoring. I select the negative ones. I guess that makes me a pessimist. I'll accept that label. I moved on from Director in 1994, and have never looked back. I moved on from Macromedia in 2004. Don't miss them one bit. I moved on from Microsoft in 2005. Don't miss them either. I moved on from Adobe in 2012. Same yet again. They are just software companies, and the products they sold were just tools. They performed a necessary function for the task I was performing at the time. It was not a lifestyle choice. It was just a job. I moved on to bigger and better things. I am proud of my experience, but would not go back to those days for anything. I rarely look back. Instead, I tend to be looking forward. I am pretty happy with the tools I use now for the various tasks I perform, but honestly, there is not a single tool at my disposal that I can't see a better, more efficient way, and can't wait to get to the next thing.
You certainly don't impress me as an HTML5 coder or a jQuery expert. I don't think you could put together an SQL query if your life depended on it. You are a total poser in my opinion. The bottom line is, speak directly about your coding experience or STFU. You said you taught programming but all of your comments point to total cluelessness.
I also find it funny how the Facebook Security Officer is against Flash, but apparently that doesn't stop Facebook from using it on their videos.
I tried and it doesn't work for me, I just get a never ending red spinner, however Click for Flash does, if on it forces HTML5.
You certainly don't impress me as an HTML5 coder or a jQuery expert. I don't think you could put together an SQL query if your life depended on it. You are a total poser in my opinion. The bottom line is, speak directly about your coding experience or STFU. You said you taught programming but all of your comments point to total cluelessness.
I love you too.
That's odd - it should work. Just for example this news page - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-33517910 - doesn't normally play in Safari without Flash, but change the user agent to IOS/iPad and it does. What pages are you having trouble with and do you maybe have some plug-ins installed that could be preventing it loading?
Why is that better than the Click to Flash option in Safari ? ... I'm genuinely curious not disagreeing. I tried Chrome for ten minutes but Little Snitch lit up like a Christmas tree with all the out going data connections to Google and others. I removed it immediately.
Depends on what you regard as the lesser evil -- letting Chrome take care of sandboxing and updating the plugin, or handing admin privileges to some random Adobe updater service.
I've tried every installer available and my Mac hangs up. This is after I tried installing the new version of Flash Player. I think my Mac is corrupted. The installers just hang up and I have to force quit. I read that the Flash bug may have allowed malware to be installed on my computer. Does anyone know if that is true, and if so, how to get rid of it?
Arguing CAD software, SolidWorks & Edge:
Are you guys in the right thread?
I also find it funny how the Facebook Security Officer is against Flash, but apparently that doesn't stop Facebook from using it on their videos.
Its ‘only' the security officer, not the CEO making the comments.
People don’t adapt well once they’ve invested time familiarizing themselves with one or another scheme.
And we know that most large ships take a long time to turn. Facebook is for grannies.