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February 27, 2006
Malik & Kennedy on Flash
Malik & Kennedy on Flash: Om Malik and Niall Kennedy have a text transcription of an audio chat they held, and they mention Flash Player version towards the middle. I left a comment there, but there was a glitch in the TypeKey registration, and I'm not sure it took... I'll leave it in comments here so I've got a log of it. I was basically in my "half the internet was upgraded in three months ohmygosh do you know what this MEANS!?!" mode, which you've probably heard from me before.... ;-) (I like how they provided a text version of their audio content, by the way... search engines are getting better with varied media types, but full-text search is still useful for presentations which are just words.)
Posted by John Dowdell at February 27, 2006 05:15 PM
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Comments
Original comment follows:
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Hi Om, Niall, thanks for the mention of Flash in there... bouncing off that a bit:
I agree that consumer versioning is critically important -- when combining server-side processing (PHP, .NET, ColdFusion etc) with client-side processing (Flash, JavaScript, HTML etc), it's really important to know exactly how the various client machines out there will support your work. Saying "Flash Support" is not enough -- we need to know what level of Flash support.
But the amazing thing is that the Macromedia Flash 8 Player has had insane levels of adoption among consumers. It was introduced at the end of Aug05, and a mid-December consumer audit by NPD/MediaMetrix showed that 50% of consumers tested could already see SWF8 content:
http://www.macromedia.com/software/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html
The Flash 7 Player was already the most widely-adopted piece of software in internet history, and Flash 8 Player is being adopted almost twice as fast.
This client-side versioning is real important if you're doing "RIAs", "Ajax", "Web 2.0" or anything else that relies on a mix of server-side and client-side processing. When can you start using new features? What types of support costs will you incur? Knowing the client-side capabilities is vital to reach a realworld audience.
Flash evolves faster than any other distributed web technology. (Please 'scuse the hardsell, but this is important.) Within a year of distribution the overwhelming majority of the public has the new version installed on their machines. You get new features faster than with web browser updates or operating system upgrades, and the total cost of development is less when writing to one universal engine than to various browsers.
The versioning of consumer capabilities is very important to actual development costs -- thanks for bringing it up!
(The On2 codec was in Flash Player 8, released Aug05, and probably nearing the 70% consumer viewability area by now -- more people run this already than run the current version of Windows. The Sorenson codec in Flash 6 reached near-universal viewability a year or so ago. And for free SWF tools, check out the free Flex 2 at Adobe Labs -- no capital needed to create high-end interfaces quickly, easily, and with predictable playback.)
tx, jd/adobe
Posted by: John Dowdell at February 27, 2006 05:31 PM