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Graphics Software

Feeling Frightfully Forever Flashless? 42

Posted by Cliff from the people-perplexed-by-the-pittance-of-plugins dept.
ghost_crab asks: "After finally getting the guts to fdisk all my M$ problems away, I find myself happier and less stressed. Now all I want for Christmas is a good, solid Flash editor, a la Macromedia's Flash, or even Adobe's Live Motion, neither of which run well with WINE. I have queried both companies for projected *nix releases, and both have instead emphatically supported the EvilEmpire. A search with Google and of SourceForge gives one little hope. Is anyone working on Flash for Linux? Open Source or Not - I would be thrilled to pay for a good Flash Editor. Is there hope for those of us who claim to be graphic designers yet cannot stomach Windows for even one more day?" Is there anyone out there working on replacements for the plugins that are only available for Windows?

Flash support on Linux has always been questionable for me. I can get it to work in Netscape Communicator. Mozilla doesn't seem to want to recognize the plugin and Konqueror? Well, Konqueror just locks up hard when it encounters Flash content...either that or it throws up lots of windows when it tries to go to Macromedia's site, which bothers me to no end. Unless other OSes gain access to richer-than-HTML-content, their users will slowly find themselves left behind in a web that's becoming more and more centered on Win32-only content, which would not be a good thing.
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Feeling Frightfully Forever Flashless? More

Feeling Frightfully Forever Flashless?

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  • First post (Score:3, Insightful)

    by TheDarkRogue ( 245521 ) on Friday December 07, 2001 @09:48AM (#2670351)
    Well, if it's windows you really must avoid and you need *nix why not move to macosx? There is a port of all of the good Graphics/Video tools to macos. Yea your gonna have to get a new computer but you would get your flash and not be in windows.

    • Offtopic? Whatever... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Valdrax ( 32670 )
      How, exactly, is this off-topic?

      The poster of the article in no way emphasized any desire to move to Linux except as a means of getting away from Microsoft. The Macintosh is a viable solution that allows one access to a wide range of multimedia products including several Flash development tools while avoiding the Evil Empire. You can get both Macromedia Flash and Adobe GoLive for the Mac without allowing MS software to touch your system. (...with the exception of IE, which takes all of 5 minutes to delete after you've download OmniWeb or Mozilla.)

  • Cross-Over (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by DaoudaW ( 533025 )
    In response to Cliff's comment I've had good success with Codeweavers Cross-Over plugin on Navigator and Konqueror. It works in Mozilla, ie, it doesn't crash, but the video is screwed up.

    But ghost crab [mailto] was mostly asking for an editor, not a plug-in. Let me add Authorware to the list of needed editors.
  • Because Cliff added it to the submission. I just started using Konqueror, and have been quite annoyed at the macromedia pop up windows (thought I hit a porn site accidentally the first time it happened). How/where do I disable this?

    Yes, I am too lazy to RTFM and do a Google search.

  • No, not the plugin (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Ratbert42 ( 452340 ) on Friday December 07, 2001 @11:08AM (#2670623)

    In case nobody reads what ghost_crab wrote, I'll point this out. He's not looking for a Flash plugin for his browser. He's looking for a Flash authoring tool.

    With the SWF format being semi-open, I don't see any technical reason someone couldn't build this.

    • Re:No, not the plugin (Score:4, Informative)

      by Matts ( 1628 ) on Friday December 07, 2001 @11:38AM (#2670805) Homepage
      The reason isn't technical.

      It takes a long time to write software like this, and often it takes a number of people working closely together. In short, this isn't something that is just going to work by putting together a sourceforge project and hoping people will come along and help - it's going to take dedicated effort, and that will probably come in the form of a closed source proprietary company taking the stand and doing it.

      Personally though I'd look more towards SVG, and hope someone can do a good SVG->Flash converter. You'd lose sounds (since SVG doesn't do sound natively, though you could do it with SMIL, which is supported in Real One). If Real and Adobe got together and combined their SVG plugin and Real player you'd have a pretty kickass low bandwidth vector graphics + sound + animation system. Unfortunately that still leaves us waiting for an authoring system...

  • Flashless. (Score:3, Funny)

    by MindStalker ( 22827 ) <mindstalker@[ ]il.com ['gma' in gap]> on Friday December 07, 2001 @11:26AM (#2670734) Journal
    Yes, I agree, sence moving to Linux, I havn't gotten flashed once!

    BURN KARMA BURN!

  • Eww, stay away. (Score:2, Troll)

    by bluGill ( 862 )

    I'm sure flash is useful for something, but I've never had a flash plug in on my computer and never missed it. Lynx works great for 95% of the web sites I work with, and the rest are either broken (you must have javascript and a 4.x browser to use, even though if I manually bypass those warnings it works), or accually have content that relys on graphics.

    Do you really need flash? Are you sure. I'm sure there are people who will answer yes. I wouldn't expect a artist to produce anything that is useful to the blind, and I wouldn't expect their websites to work without images. The are likewise similear examples of other catagories that need extra content. Most places that have flash don't have anything to do with something that needs it.

    • Re:Eww, stay away. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Pachooka-san ( 88633 )
      I am involved in a project to do distance learning for a branch of the military - guess what, it's all flash. No flash, no training. The powers that be have specified IE-only - they're a Micro$oft-only shop. I've tried to explain that there are other browsers out there, but to no avail. The only hope is that Section 508 (the requirement to provide web access to the disabled) will force them away from their IE monomania.

      • Re:Eww, stay away. (Score:2, Insightful)

        by ScumBiker ( 64143 )
        Ahhh, 508. It appears to be my saviour here also. I'm a geek in a M$ world where I work. I actually get laughed at sometimes, simply because I suggest we can save a boatload of money by moving to open-source. Oh well...
        One possible solution to the flash editor thing is to use something like k-illustrator to make your sprites and Flash under vmware or wine to put it together. Oher than that, I think your hosed. Unless we can get a bunch of hackers to write an open source SWF editor.

    • Flash: 99% Bad (Score:5, Insightful)

      by brlewis ( 214632 ) on Friday December 07, 2001 @12:15PM (#2671032) Homepage
      Agreed. People choosing flash should read Jakob Nielsen's column, Flash: 99% Bad [useit.com]. Among other problems, he mentions the way it breaks web fundamentals:
      • The "Back" button does not work. If you navigate within a Flash object, the standard backtracking method takes you out of the multimedia object and not, as expected, to the previous state.
      • Link colors don't work. Given this, you cannot easily see where you've been and which links you've yet to visit. This lack of orientation creates navigational confusion.
      • The "Make text bigger/smaller" button does not work. Users are thus forced to read text in the designer-specified font size, which is almost always too small since designers tend to have excellent vision.
      • Flash reduces accessibility for users with disabilities.
      • The "Find in page" feature does not work. In general, Flash integrates poorly with search.
      • Internationalization and localization is complicated. Local websites must enlist a Flash professional to translate content. Also, text that moves is harder to read for users who lack fluency in the language.
      • > of us who claim to be graphic designers yet cannot stomach

        Your post is like asking a mechanic not to work on Lada's, because they are bad cars. You miss the point. People pay this guy to do flash; he doesn't write flash because he thinks its god's gift to UI. He's a graphic designer. Your points would be far more useful if aimed at clients who are looking for graphic design projects to be completed.

        On top of this, there is no question that as an interface for a website flash sucks. However, as nonfunctional/nonmenucontaining/nonnavigational eyecandy, with the guiding hand of a seasoned graphic designer and a little ui sense, it can turn a page from bland to sweet in under 10 seconds. Everything has a place and purpose - the real talent is not to paint things in black and white, but rather to understand the limitations of a technology in order to use it effectively. There's no question that flash is over used, but to suggest that there is never a use for it is a vast over simplification of a very complex science.
      • Hmmmm....so I suppose we shouldn't ever have to think for ourselves again after we learn where the navigational buttons in our browser are....

        c'mon, flash IS different than html, if it wasnt, then it wouldnt be FLASH. Lots of people appreciate the fact that it is something a bit different.

      • Re:Flash: 99% Bad (Score:2, Insightful)

        by liquidsin ( 398151 )
        to answer your points, in order:
        • you shouldn't build a whole site in flash. The back button shouldn't be an issue. People who make whole sites in flash should be shot.
        • see above
        • for the most part, flash is going to be used to draw attention, which usually means no small text (unless you are one of the afore-mentioned dimwits who makes the whole site in flash
        • I'm all for accessibility for the disabled (summary tags in tables, etc) but flash is eyecandy. Trying to make it more friendly to the blind is like trying to make quake more usable for the blind.
        • see first two points
        • once again, eyecandy. I've seen flash that was done in other languages, totally impossible for me to read - but enjoyable to watch.

        the point is, flash isn't 99% bad, unless you're in the 1% of designers trying to use it to replace html.
      • This seems to be a recurring problem whenever you ask a linux guy anything. Instead of an answer to your question, you get a 5 minute rant telling you why you really shouldn't do what you want to do.

        ugh.
        • A Freaking men........ It's kinda like when people tell you to RTFM and your question was on where to find the Freaking Manual. In short does anyone have an answer to this guys question?
      • I've always wondered why people fail to noticed that following nielson's recommendations will cause your site to look like shit. There is room on the web for all kinds of content, and it doesn't need to be accessible to everyone. There are many pages in foreign languages that I don't understand, but so what. Nielson reminds me of swiss modernist graphic design. Easy to use and ugly really, but also totalitarian.

        I think the problem that people here have with flash is that it moves the web away from something that's maintained by a D&D playing webmaster who wears birkenstocks.
      • Stupid!



        Maybe "web fundamentals" is changing.. the web isn't gopher, you know.. dumb lynx users who say "Content blahb lah" etc., just cause you have no sense of aesthetics doesn't mean there isn't a place in the world for it. I can get all teh content I want, and so can anyone else with ahlf a brain- now let's dress it up a little!

        Would you recommend stripping the grace notes and ornamentation out of a piece of music, because "they serve no purpose and obscure the true melody"?

  • Since OSX is kinda sorta based on nix technology, shouldn't it be pretty easy to make an OSX emulation or interpretter?


    Not sure that I care, but I'm sure there is someone out there who cares enough to work on that endeavor. Try searching on that-- and maybe that will be the road to solving your dilemma. Or, like previous posters, just buy a Mac and be free of the evil empire and have a pretty decent box.

  • There are a few libraries floating around that are quite functional, Ming is one, libswf is another. These libraries provide functions that create flash objects in code, i.e. createCircle() or whatever. We just need to wrap an editor around them. The problem is that vector graphics are usually somewhat complex mathematical beasts, especially when designing an UI to directly manipulate them.

  • Some hope on the horizon (Score:5, Insightful)

    by orangesquid ( 79734 ) <orangesquid@nOspaM.yahoo.com> on Friday December 07, 2001 @11:48AM (#2670866) Homepage Journal
    I have found two Flash content generation products -- SWIFT and Ming.

    From swift-tools.com [swift-tools.com]:
    Swift-Generator is a Dynamic Flash? Content generator. It aims at dynamically replacing texts, fonts, sounds, images and movie clips in either a Template file or a standard Flash? file. It can also dynamically change action parameters in either frames or buttons.
    This allows Webmasters to create dynamic content such as stock-exchange values, sport scoring, weather values, news tickers and the like. Swift-Generator only requires an authoring tool like Macromedia® Flash? 4 or 5. Once a Flash? file is created, Swift-Generator is able to handle it.

    This will only work for filling in templates, but its definitely a start... perhaps SWIFT-tools will release a full editor in the future?

    From opaque.net [opaque.net]:

    Ming is a c library for generating SWF ("Flash") format movies, plus a set of wrappers for using the library from c++ and popular scripting languages like PHP, Python, and Ruby.

    Ming is just a library, but perhaps somebody will develop a graphical front-end for it in the future.

  • Mozilla and flash plugin (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by Tet ( 2721 )
    Mozilla doesn't seem to want to recognize the plugin

    Odd. It Just Worked for me. I've been using the flash plugin in Mozilla since 0.8 or so without too many problems. In fact, the only major problem I have it that it hangs the browser if another application has /dev/dsp open and a flash movie tries to do sound until the first app is closed. Oh, and of course it doesn't work on my non-x86 Linux boxen (currently Sparc and Alpha). But I don't really miss flash enough to bothered to try Olivier Debon's free flash plugin [swift-tools.com]. As others have pointed out, there are options for flash authoring under Unix, but I can't say I've needed to use them (but then I've never yet come across a web site that benefited from having flash).

  • If you want to be able to produce flash from code, php has an excellent libswf module written by Paul Haeberli. The docs are located here [php.net]. Of course, this doesn't give you a fancy gui to develop from, but it is flexible :)
  • Macromedia has the full SWF File Format SDK [macromedia.com] on their website. Now get crackin! I expect a beta version on my desk in a week!

  • Flash is flawed. A rebuild could make it great. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wu-lee ( 542175 ) on Friday December 07, 2001 @08:17PM (#2673877)
    Flash is good, but it could have been great.

    From the point of view of an animation tool, I would say, Flash is good - but flawed. Also, as an alternative to java applets for a slicker web experience, it is also flawed. Version 5 was a disappointment, since all my original gripes aren't dealt with at all.

    I don't know much about the downloadable file format and its limitations, but my guess is that a fresh design has the potential to address these flaws, if not remove them completely. Or maybe that would require rewriting the file format?

    Hmmm... maybe the solution is some sort of Java Bean that plays Flash movies? Or is Java too slow?

    These are my criticisms - they turned into a bit of a rant, sorry - Flash isn't all bad,just annoyingly imperfect. Note, I've never used Adobe's Live Motion, or Macromedia Generator.

    • Shape Tweening: This is potentially a wonderful timesaver. But if you try anything trivial, it just won't do what you expect. Even a straight line tweened into another straight line is unpredictable - the choice of which end morphs into which is decided by the editor application - apparently it maps each end of the initial line to the nearest of the final line. So, you can have it morphing one way, then move an end slightly and suddently it'll switch.

      This problem is only slightly alleviated by the use of shape hints.

      Basically, Flash tries to be too clever. It allows you to draw a shape with any number of control points, then it chooses the mapping from initial points to final points. Where this is not a one-to-one mapping it adds in points mid-morph. And one point can be mapped to two totally disparate final points. So, while a circle morphed into a square is an intuative thing to imagine, Flash may decide to morph the circle into one side of it, and have three other circles spring out from nowhere to make up the other sides. And when you get it to work, it's fragile - a slight slip and suddenly shape A morphs into shape B via a cloud of garbage. Using it to tween a walk cycle is a recipe for disaster - I don't bother any more.

      So - it's fine for making some text dissolve into a cloud of polygons which reassemble themselves into something else. But that's about it.

      How I would suggest it should be done is this: draw a starting shape, whatever you like. Select it, and copy it to the final frame of the morph, turning on tweening. Then modify the final version - this ensures that the number of points is constant and the choice of which morphs to which is obvious, controllable, and intuative.

    • Forms: Another use of Flash which seems attractive is as a form of applet. Then, as well as looking a bit nicer, the form could cache data internally, and exchange only those chunks it needs to with the server via XML (which Flash5 supports). Potentially an online form would be much less clunky, and more like a standard GUI.

      Also, potentially it could improve session security by allowing client-side encryption and, hashing.

      There are several problems with this: although form components (combo boxes, radio buttons, etc.) are available, they are unresizable without a redrawing all the internals. The scripting cannot manipulate graphics primitives, only movie clips, so they cannot be generated on-the-fly. A button cannot be duplicated with different text, it has to copied and manually changed. Basically the all GUI controls I've seen don't hide their complexity.

    • Finally, the scripting - although it is mostly like javascript,it isn't quite the same, and has some very funny and undocumented scoping rules, which makes for some puzzling problems where variable x doesn't contain what you want it to, and you can't figure out why. And there is only rudimentary "print" style debugging available - so, any scripting is going to be time consuming because bugs are so easy to introduce and hard to find.

      Use of other scripting languages would be nice, and presumably this could piggyback on the debugging tools available for them. This is where flash would really benefit from the pooled efforts of its users. Plus, server-side scripting tools like SWIFT would allow you to generate components on the server, relieving the graphic designer from having to redraw virtually the same component many times.

    So - I probably won't get aroud to all this, but maybe some selfless sub-genius soul can do it all for nothing by next week?
  • Macromedia's Flash Plugin is horribly broken when using Linux thin clients with both LTSP.org and Solucorp's XTerminals package. It causes all versions of Mozilla to segfault by the 1st or 2nd page that uses Flash. Netscape works sometimes, but is unstable and crashes with segfaults too. Konqueror either locks up, or crashes displaying the KDE segfault dialogue window.

    Strangely, Opera 6.0 beta 1 and beta 2 seem mostly stable with Macromedia's plugin, however I can't use Opera due to lack of Japanese input support and I rather not buy 50 licenses of Opera for the thin clients.

    Has anyone found a workaround for this problem? Macromedia hasn't released an update for their plugin since January 2001, and several KDE and Linux Terminal Server folks have reported this problem to Macromedia without hearing anything in return.
  • Actually two different issues here - the first is the solution to your Flash content authoring needs in Linux (congrats on that final fdisk btw ;-). The second regards the current scarcity of polished plug-in support to actually render your work in non-Iexplore browsers.

    2nd issue first: There are many programmers out there working tirelessly on open source browser and OS alternatives for us (thanks guys) but there is much so much work to be done yet so one way to help is to donate money and hardware (like say old i386 stuff) to open source organizations like mozilla, KDE, etc. to aid them in further development of plugins that actually work the way they should - remember these are all works in progress and they are competing with some pretty deep pockets.

    1st issue second: I have a couple of possible directions here for you to poke around: Don't forget you can run Solaris, SGI, HPUX binaries too (at least I can on my FreeBSD machine - so probably Linux too) and there may be some cool (albeit commercial and pricey) stuff available that route although I alas can only make the suggestion - perhaps someone else has experience with this? As a fellow graphic designer turning geek this is on my list of things to play with one of these days as I gain time/knowledge.

    Secondly I don't want to troll, but I would refer you to another very interesting "ask /." about building a PC for an artist (graphic designer = artist) that contains comments [slashdot.org] regarding Mac OSX you may find useful in your quest as a M$ free artist.

  • I don't like flash because, specifically, the tools cost an arm and a leg, and are completely owned by one company.

    Javascript, on the other hand, is a publically available language that can potentially do everything that flash can.

    However, javascript on Netscape is like Javascript on IE's retarded parapalegic brother. By comparison, it is capable of doing about half as many things. Plus, the language is far more strict and has undocumented problems. I sincerely wish that Microsoft would port IE to Linux. Of course, if they did, I'd have no real reason to use Windows.

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