[workerbee]

Possiby not the place to post this, but still... it's been awfully long since we last heard anything from Macromedia re: their OS X plans. Using Dreamweaver in Classic simply does not cut it for me, Director 7 mysteriously does not even start up in Classic while Dir 8 does, and watching shockwave content in OS X would be quite appreciated too... does anyone around here have any idea as to when we'll see anything carbonized from Macromedia? DW5? FW5? Flash6? Dir9?

[dextrome]

Uhhh... IE 5.1 lets me watch Flash and Shockwave just fine...

[Sine]

Originally posted by dextrome:
<STRONG>Uhhh... IE 5.1 lets me watch Flash and Shockwave just fine...</STRONG>

I think he means the application to make Flash media..

[edddeduck]

Well e-mail them...

I normally get a response esp if you use a more important sounding e-mail address ie not [email protected]

Send them a line and ask them whats going on you usually get a responce..

btw make sure its mac tech support as the rumors about no photoshop came from sending e-mail to a PC person who knew diddly squat...

Also most tech support know diddly squat anyway but theres always hope...

Good Luck

Edd

[Sine]

If Freehand is any clue as to the rest of the Macromedia line.. everything should be just fine.

[mfessenden]

Right before the Sep 11th tragedy I read about some kind of Macromedia seminar where they mentioned that Flash OSX was going to be previewed. I think it was cancelled in the wake of the crashes.

As someone who uses Ultradev heavily on a day to day basis, I think that the Dreamweaver updates are going to be significant now that we have access to web services with UNIX. I would expect the overhaul to be pretty major, but that's just an opinion.

Mike

[workerbee]

Originally posted by dextrome:
<STRONG>Uhhh... IE 5.1 lets me watch Flash and Shockwave just fine...</STRONG>

Really? Do you happen to have a pre-release of a carbonized Shockwave player, or are you using Classic IE? I have not been able to find anything but the Flash Player for OSX on the MM d/l pages.

Questions about MM plans re: OS X regularly get answers like "if I told you, I'd have to kill you" on the various MM discussion boards, so I don't think sending e-mails will get any answers.

I absolutely believe that MM will deliver carbonized versions of all their mainstay apps with the next revision, I was just wondering whether anyone had heard anything... (Also, I can't wait for DW5 :-)

[godzookie2k]

Originally posted by Sine:
<STRONG>If Freehand is any clue as to the rest of the Macromedia line.. everything should be just fine.</STRONG>

Depending on your opinion on freehand, everything could be fine, or everything could be absolute crap.... I'm in the latter.


nick

[theolein]

Uhm, Macromedias Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks and Ultradev are all based on that wacky Javascript (possibly gecko too) engine from Mozilla. Considering the state of Mozilla on OSX, you might be in for a wait.

[godzookie2k]

Originally posted by theolein:
<STRONG>Uhm, Macromedias Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks and Ultradev are all based on that wacky Javascript (possibly gecko too) engine from Mozilla. Considering the state of Mozilla on OSX, you might be in for a wait.</STRONG>

No, way? Really? That I did not know. Oh GOD are we in for a wait.


Nick

[foamy]

Uhm, Macromedias Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks and Ultradev are all based on that wacky Javascript (possibly gecko too) engine from Mozilla. Considering the state of Mozilla on OSX, you might be in for a wait.

What? Do you have any documentation of that? IIRC Dreamweaver was a mature product before mozilla was out of its infancy.

A lot of DW config uses JS and XML, but I have never heard that it is based on Mozilla code. I would love to see some evidence of that.

Moreover, Mozilla absolutely flies on OSX...Startup and New windows aside

[SezMe]

Macromedia confuses the issue by calling its plug-in "Shockwave Flash NP-PPC", but in fact it only plays Flash content, not Shockwave (which is content produced by Director).

I'm another one desparately waiting for a Carbonised version of Director. Please oh please!

Hey I just noticed that the first poster in this thread is named "workerbee" Cute.

[godzookie2k]

Macromedia has always called its Flash plugin, Shockwave-Flash. This is because SWF (flash format) means, shockwave flash (or format depending on who you talk to). Director publishes the "true" shockwave format .dcr. The appropriate plugin is called "Dir-Shockwave"


nick

(this is like the second time in two days that I have explained this... odd.)

[walrusjb]

We should know about DW/UD + Fireworks pretty soon. Traditionally, DW + FW are on a late October/Early November Release Announcement with a Dec. 12 -18 release schedule - we have the date worked into our budgets

[workerbee]

Originally posted by walrusjb:
<STRONG>We should know about DW/UD + Fireworks pretty soon. Traditionally, DW + FW are on a late October/Early November Release Announcement with a Dec. 12 -18 release schedule - we have the date worked into our budgets </STRONG>

That's about what I figured, too, looking at the various receipts for MM software in the last few years, and also why I hoped someone might be able to shed some light :-)

[piracy]

From http://www.apple.com/macosx/applications/

�As the first product we delivered for Mac OS X, Macromedia FreeHand 10 has gotten an amazing response,� said Kevin Lynch, president of Macromedia Products. �Mac OS X provides us with a great platform to bring our market-leading solutions to Apple�s next-generation operating system.�

From http://www.macromedia.com/support/ge...sx_support.htm

"Macromedia is excited about Apple's latest operating system and is committed to creating native "carbonized" Mac OS X versions of our products in the future. FreeHand 10 is the first carbonized Macromedia product. For those Macromedia products not "Carbonized", we plan to release Carbonized versions of our applications in the next full product releases. We expect that these releases will include Mac OS X support as one of many features of the release, and anticipate that the upgrades will be priced in line with our current upgrade pricing model."

[mftalon]

I have to agree, the "shockwave flash NP-PPC" plugin is misleading as it only plays flash .swf files from the application of the same name Flash. It doesn't play Shockwave files that are generated by Director.

I'm still waiting for that OSX shockwave player/plugin.

[Sine]

Originally posted by godzookie2k:
<STRONG>

Depending on your opinion on freehand, everything could be fine, or everything could be absolute crap.... I'm in the latter.


nick</STRONG>

\

While I am not a fan of Freehand.. it was coded well for Carbon

[+ spiral +]

Originally posted by godzookie2k:
<STRONG>Depending on your opinion on freehand, everything could be fine, or everything could be absolute crap.... I'm in the latter.
</STRONG>

Agreed. Being a long time Freehand defender / FH-only user, i fear Macromedia's influence over the once great Aldus program is ill-fated. This partially might have to do with the fact that the programs seem to be sloppy windows ports when it used to be mac first. Now that the interface has adopted the worst one of the lineup (ie. flash 5), i am searching for alternatives. Corel anyone?

More generally when i was a .communist we had a partnership with Macromedia and they always appeared pretty disheveled. I believe there is internal floundering as (this is only hearsay) they laid off their Generator group. That might be a result of product re-evaluation and general net slump, though.

Basically Macromedia was pretty sweet when it actually improved their product line (or maybe that was when it just bought the product out from another company). Fingers crossed for a FH 10 update SOOOON.

Just to keep this on-topic: 10.1 is pretty okay. Mostly.

jf

[lucipher]

Originally posted by dextrome:
<STRONG>Uhhh... IE 5.1 lets me watch Flash and Shockwave just fine...</STRONG>

Have you guys ever compared the speed of Flash Player on Macs (OS 9 and X) and PCs? I think Macromedia never really takes Mac seriously. This sucks....

[Hornet]

Now that the interface has adopted the worst one of the lineup (ie. flash 5), i am searching for alternatives.

Hmmm. I like flash 5's interface, I use it day in day out. Much faster to use than flash 4, I prefer the "lets cram everything into small window on the side of your project" as opposed to "lets make a new window for everything that you want to change beyond the basics".

I hate the menus tho. Please macromedia, we moved on from system 7 ages ago..... atleast give us platinum menus!!!!

Have you guys ever compared the speed of Flash Player on Macs (OS 9 and X) and PCs? I think Macromedia never really takes Mac seriously. This sucks....

You bet. My last project was a seriously processor intensive job, and I was getting in the 15-20fps range on my G4. I was amazed when I saw it run on some cheap p3 at the full 30fps I set, looked much smoother than it did on mine. The plugin SUCKS put simply, and apples implementation in QT is FAR worse.... 1/4 the framerate in 10.1 QT for my movies compared to flash player in 9. The plugin for IE/NS is worse that the player....

urgh I hope they reprogram the whole lot, take into acount altivec ATLEAST macromedia! Surely that vector math stuff could get a nice boost with altivec?

[Brit Ben]

Originally posted by Hornet:
<STRONG>

urgh I hope they reprogram the whole lot, take into acount altivec ATLEAST macromedia! Surely that vector math stuff could get a nice boost with altivec?</STRONG>

GOD ! There is one. Someone with the same complaint !!! I present extensively from flash. I would LOVE a kickass altivec optimized flash player

PC's should NOT be faster for this app. a decent G4 with a lot of RAM should blast the competition out of the water, yet strangely doesn't.

Come on Macromedia, please get your act together. This is one of the reasons I changed from PC to Mac in the first place....


Ben.

[oranjdisc]

I follow the developments in the Flash community quite closely, and IMO it looks like Macromedia has been waiting for OSX before making the app more "friendly" on the Mac side. Any extra work they could have put into making the plug-ins and application run better in OS 9 would have been moot with OSX right around the corner.

I hope I'm right. Then again, I about screamed when Flash 5 came out and Macromedia was STILL using a System 7 style Finder. Disgraceful.

[philzilla]

since about OS 9.1, i haven't been able to use flash properly. i can't drag anything out of my libaray and there's a few other things that bug the **** out of me. i counted one day, how many times it crashed on me: 53!

as a friend of mine said:

if (flash == "gay" ) {
delete(flash);
}

[dashiel]

macromedia products will be updated, when their upgrade cycle approaches. you won't see any .x or .5 releases. fireworks and dreamweaver as previously stated are due for their next release soon. though i would say to look more at a jan/feb 2002.

flash for X i saw running with mine own eyes, though it was the flash5 app and it was a very, very short demo. leading me to believe it wasn't entirely stable. it was explicitly stated that flash5 would not be carbonized, and instead flash6 would be the first X version. based on the 18 month product cycle of flash, i would guess flash will be announced at the flash forward san fran 2002 keynote.

the flash playback engine on the mac, does indeed suck, there are some tricks to help gain parity with the pc side, but they are just that tricks, not acceptable solutions. the lack of browser communication with IE is another annoying issue. the current flash5 playback engine is fairly poor anyway. any code written in flash5 syntax is down-converted to flash4 syntax and then applied. from what i've heard there is at least the hope that these issues will be taken care of with flash6.

i for one hope they leverage the quartz rendering engine and offload some of the tasks usually handled by the player to the OS.

finally to the whole shockwave/shockwave-flash thing. way back when macromedia first started doing shockwave, there was an entire familiy of shockwave plug-ins, shockwave-authorware (still in limited existance), shockwave-freehand, shockwave-director. it was sort of their umbrella nomenclature for web enabled files of their applications. the freehand plugin never really took off, i think the authorware plugin is mostly used in legacy, internal intranet type apps (certainly never run in to one on the web) and then they bought future splash animator, nee flash, that was the only other plugin to take off. i think they want people to download the whole shockwave package, but feedback from all sorts convinced them to offer flash as a seperate download (file size issues).

since shockwave, the familiy, is dead i agree they should just call flash, flash, but with the mime types set in browsers and servers already it would end up causing problems.

Originally posted by theolein:
Uhm, Macromedias Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks and Ultradev are all based on that wacky Javascript (possibly gecko too) engine from Mozilla. Considering the state of Mozilla on OSX, you might be in for a wait.

no, they are not based on javascript. they simply use javascript as their internal scripting engine to perform batch processing and/or complex tasks. i don't know what each app is developed in, but would guess any mixture of C, C++, VB etc...

[theolein]

Originally posted by foamy:
<STRONG>

What? Do you have any documentation of that? IIRC Dreamweaver was a mature product before mozilla was out of its infancy.

A lot of DW config uses JS and XML, but I have never heard that it is based on Mozilla code. I would love to see some evidence of that.

Moreover, Mozilla absolutely flies on OSX...Startup and New windows aside </STRONG>

I actually posted this about two days ago but this F*CKING useless POS that calls itself a forum has gone and lost my posts. Thanks Admins
, I appreciate your comprehension of technology and your ability to secure your data
&lt;/ranT&gt;

Early last year I found a not on Netscape's devedge site about the Javascript engine that powers Mozilla where they had all their customer quotes saying how dandy it was. One of the post was from Macromedia in reference to Dreamweaver. I notice how the post dissappeared about two days later. Also you may have noticed how Flash 5 and dreamweaver all have the same htmlesque kind of interface. You can muck about in the config XML files and change menues etc in Dreamweaver which is alo something you can do in Mozilla. The gecko bit is my speculation based on the fact the extension interface seems to work very similarly to Mozillas.

[theolein]

Originally posted by dashiel:
<STRONG>
no, they are not based on javascript. they simply use javascript as their internal scripting engine to perform batch processing and/or complex tasks. i don't know what each app is developed in, but would guess any mixture of C, C++, VB etc...</STRONG>

See my last post. They are not based on Javascript, but they do use the Mozilla/Netscape Javascript engine for the UI Glue
. A side effect of this inclusion can be seen in Flash5's Action scripting which is a Javascript clone. The tight integration of Javasscript into Dreamweaver and Flash begs the question whether they also used Gecko or based their code on it. I did see that post at Netscape's devedge site in January 2000. The fact that it dissappeared so soon makes me wonder if there was some attempt to hide a GPL/NPL violation or if they did a deal with Netscape on the side so as to be able to use the code without having to NPL/GPL it.

[anarkisst]

Originally posted by mftalon:
<STRONG>I have to agree, the "shockwave flash NP-PPC" plugin is misleading as it only plays flash .swf files from the application of the same name Flash. It doesn't play Shockwave files that are generated by Director.

I'm still waiting for that OSX shockwave player/plugin.</STRONG>

Confusing? Yes, but you're wrong in the sense that you have an option to install the Shockwave-Flash plug-in either for Flash only (which is the default plug-in in most browsers) or the full featured plug-in that includes viewing Director files. Which I think is around 500 kb...

I find it funny that nobody is really whining about Quark, Adobe and everyone else who seem to have their thumb up their butt about OS X...I myself am just wanting IOMEGA to release OX versions of their drivers/Tools...oh, and Agfa...and Epson...et al...

[dashiel]

Originally posted by theolein:
<STRONG>

See my last post. They are not based on Javascript, but they do use the Mozilla/Netscape Javascript engine for the UI Glue
. A side effect of this inclusion can be seen in Flash5's Action scripting which is a Javascript clone. The tight integration of Javasscript into Dreamweaver and Flash begs the question whether they also used Gecko or based their code on it. I did see that post at Netscape's devedge site in January 2000. The fact that it dissappeared so soon makes me wonder if there was some attempt to hide a GPL/NPL violation or if they did a deal with Netscape on the side so as to be able to use the code without having to NPL/GPL it.</STRONG>

there is no javascript inside of flash5, it uses a derivative of ECMA-262 which in turn was based on javascript, but the fact that gary grossman chose to use ECMA style scripting isn't in any way indicative that the program has any core elements (including UI) hasa anything to do with javascript.

i don't use dreamweaver, but it makes sense that macromedia uses the gecko rendering engine for the default dreamweaver preview. since gecko is supposed to follow W3 standards pretty tightly.

there's no conspiracy theory