« Greasemonkey use | Main | Player in Apple updater »
March 13, 2007
Player 9, 93%
Player 9, 93%: That's apparently the current audience capability at yourminis.com, a Goowy site for Flash widgets. They're now taking advantage of ActionScript 3 and Adobe Flash Player 9, and say "There are about 7% of you that are actually running Flash 8 and you will need to upgrade your Flash version in order to continue accessing our widgets and startpage." Different audiences have different adoption rates -- general consumer norms are useful for getting a sense of how the rest of the world is active, but an individual site's audience may be behind or ahead of the general consumer curve. Sites differ. (Player 9 went into distribution last June 28, but many major sites already require this high-performance runtime.) [via Ryan Stewart]
Posted by JohnDowdell at March 13, 2007 04:09 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mtadmin/mt-tb.cgi/8476
Comments
Even 93% of the techno-savy yourminis users is impressive. I just about spilled my coffee reading 93%... the "general consumer norms" look like they're only at 50% or so. Still, that's impressive because I don't see any killer features that will bring users to Flash 9 (the way Flash 8's video did). Performance... yeah--for certain data heavy apps (I'm still trying to ascertain the Flash 9 performance improvements for graphic display). Security, maybe. Developers using Flex--definitely.
From the developer perspective, however, I'm curious what the cost and benefit to Flash 9 is exactly. I think for the huge projects, the (arguably) bigger upfront architecture cost for Flash 9 will easily pay for itself... but for the small projects, using AS3 may cause the project to cost more. I mention this only because it's not like other changes to the language. Maybe it's just because I haven't hit my stride yet in AS3 but I do think small projects will cost more in AS3.
Oh, one killer Flash 9 feature: full screen! (Not quite enough to make everyone upgrade, but it's pretty sweet.)
Posted by: Phillip Kerman at March 13, 2007 05:00 PM
I agree with Phillip to some degree. It will be hard to judge the impact of AS3 on every-day development until the Flash 9 Authoring Environment is released. With that said, what is the goal to release Studio 9 by?
[jd sez: Last week there was an announcement that full details will be at launch, March 27.]
Posted by: Julian at March 13, 2007 06:08 PM
I'm the sole flash developer for an agency, I switched to AS3 for a recent small project and I would say it's saved me time!
Learning the new language took some time up as it was done on the fly, but the nicites of AS3 made up for that, some things that would have taken days to write were done in one morning!
As for killer features: Papervision.
Posted by: Tom at March 14, 2007 03:43 AM
That's interesting Tom. I don't dispute your experience or want to discount it--but it's definitely not what I've found. What do you find so time saving in AS3?
Papervision is cool--not that I see a huge demand for it now though.
Posted by: Phillip Kerman at March 14, 2007 06:15 PM