Flash and Open Source

Anders Schneiderman asks: "I'm involved in a project that's planning to create open source toys for educating people around complicated policy questions (e.g., policy on prescription drugs). We'd really like to use Flash as our main language, but we're concerned about the fact that the major Flash development tools cost $500--more than some of the community group folks we want to involve can afford. I took a look at Sourceforge, and while there are plenty of projects that offer ways to create Flash for free, there didn't seem to be any v.1 general development tools. Did I miss something? If you want to build Flash and you don't want to pay $500, how do you do it (aside from copying somebody else's, which as Bill Gates told us is just bad, bad, bad)? And if there aren't any powerful open source tools for it, any thoughts on why?"

Re:This is ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash doesn't kill people. Webdesigners kill people.

Re:Non-Macromedia Flash tools

[Lemmy Caution]

And HTML is not compatible with people who live in places without electricity or telephones, which is a substantially higher figure both in relative and absolute terms. Anyway, when you have a specific audience in mind, Flash is fine. And it is almost impossible to do what can be done in Flash in DHTML or its equivalents, with any kind of ease. Unless you want to actually link to a working alternative for that kind of interactive, dynamic multimedia format.

Stoning

[guttentag]

"Anders Schneiderman, it is the judgment of the community that you be stoned into oblivion for uttering the word... Flash. Ow! Oof! Wait! Stop! We haven't started yet. Who threw that rock?"

It was him! Him!

"All right. Why did you throw that rock before I gave the signal?"

Well you did say 'Flash...' Ow! Ouch!

are you experienced?

[rodentia]

...the experience is the content...

That is so heavy, man. I mean, it's like, the site is about animated menus, naw'mean? I mean, like, my experience of the dancing text is the meaning of the text, naw'mean.

I thought so.

Re:what??

[Anonymous Coward]

So the real question is, "How do you want to flash today?"

No, the question is, "Who do you want to be flashed by?"

Re:Nothing Found

[56ker]

"The problem is that 99.999999% of the flash you encounter on the web is waste of bandwith."

replace the word flash with everything and you'd be on the mark!

Flash Symptoms

[jbum]

Apologies to Jeff Foxworthy.

Is your website promoting a movie or selling vacuum cleaners?
It could be a Flash site.

Does your website live in a tiny little pop-up window all it's own?
I betcha it's also a Flash site.

Does your website display the message "Loading" when you visit it?
Yep. Smells like a Flash site.

Does your website impress all your graphic designer buds?
Flash site.

Is your website incredibly fun to visit, but exactly one time only?
Might be a flash site.

Does your website have an animation of a bunch of semi-transparent oblong
objects moving in a spiral pattern?
Flash site.

Does your website have a "skip intro" button?
I'd say there's a 99% probabililty that it's a Flash site.

Is your website invisible to users who are using ad-blocking tools like Proximitron,
or slightly non-standard web browsing technology or computers that don't use one
of three well known operating systems?
Well then maybe you're abusing javascript.
OR maybe it's a flash site.

Is your website immune to being bookmarked?
Hmmm. Maybe there's an outside chance it might be a flash site.

Is the content on your website 2 years out of date, because it's
such a pain-in-the-ass to update?
Well then, there exists the possilibity it might be a flash site.